Monday, April 15, 2002		On Hardware

Sun's new son — Fire12K server
Tribune News Service

Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced the availability of its new high-end enterprise-class server, the Sun Fire 12K system, code-named Starkitty, in San Francisco.

SUN Microsystems, Inc., a market leader in high-end and entry-level servers, has launched the Sun Fire12K, a new class of low-cost, high-performance servers. The new server delivers features seen in servers priced above $1 million, providing customers with maximum investment protection, system availability, flexibility and application performance.

"With the Sun Fire 12K server, Sun will capitalize on a previously untapped market segment," said Rich Partridge, enterprise systems analyst at D.H. Brown Associates. "By employing the same technology as found in their well-received Sun Fire 15K, Sun now provides enterprise-class dynamic partitioning and concurrent serviceability at an attractive $ 5,00,000 price tag. The scalability of the Sun Fire 12K, along with its easy upgrade to the Sun Fire 15K, offers substantial performance headroom with investment protection."

The Uniboard CPU/memory board, which is transportable and interchangeable among all Sun Fire 3800-15K systems, drives down the cost of application provisioning, and is central to customers seeking to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and improve ROI. Uniboard packaging allows customers to plan and manage entire application deployments rather than focus on one system at a time.

Strategically positioned between the Sun Fire 6800 server and the Sun Fire 15K, Sun's newest Unix (R) server is the ideal system for customers undertaking server consolidation and mainframe rehosting. With cross-generational and binary compatibility across the entire SPARC/Solaris OE product line, the Sun Fire 12K scales up to 52 UltraSPARC III 900 MHz processors and offers 288 GB of memory running on the Solaris 8 OE.

Since its launch in September 2001, Sun has shipped close to 400 Sun Fire 15K systems to such industry leaders as IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), Kyoto University, Ocwen Technology Xchange, Reliant Resources, and San Diego Supercomputer Center.