Analysts: Sun Servers May Turn Heads

NEW YORK—Sun Microsystems appears to be offering state-of-the-art servers that may help it recapture lost ground among securities trading firms, industry observers tell DWT.

With much fanfare in New York last week, Sun debuted the Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 servers complete with 9.6 GHz UltraSparc T1 processors—code-named Niagara. Their price/performance levels are likely to get the attention of Wall Street user firms, says Rob Hegarty, an analyst with the TowerGroup, a market research firm based in Needham, Mass. "Sun gets what Wall Street is looking for," Hegarty says. "Sun understands that it's not performance at all costs on Wall Street now."

While the product presentation focused on the Web processing strength of the servers, Sun is also emphasizing the capabilities of these servers in processing analytics and high-transaction volumes via databases, Hegarty says.

An analyst at Celent Communications, Chad Hersh also points out that Sun is stressing throughput performance and scaling—in an effort to persuade securities firms that they begin migrating tasks "away from the old mainframe environment."

"Financial services firms can benefit—from a cost perspective—from technologies that help them to move off the mainframe and on to server-based environments," Hersh says. "Server-based environments typically have a lower total cost of ownership, and can often be more easily scaled for growth because of their flexibility. Accordingly, as clusters or grids of servers achieve near-mainframe scalability, financial services firms should watch these improvements closely and consider whether they should be using these technologies today or in the near future."

The multiple-core servers come with Sun's patented multi-threading capabilities, dubbed CoolThreads, that can process four "threads" per CPU core, officials say. The vendor is also promising savings on power, cooling and space with the new servers, which run the Solaris 10 Operating System—Sun's Unix variant—and the Sun Studio 11 development environment.

The Sun Fire T2000 server is available immediately and U.S. pricing starts at $7,795 when purchased with a System Ready Plan for software and support, Sun officials say. The server comes preloaded with Solaris 10, and pre-installed with the Java Enterprise System Software. The server offers a variety of main memory options up to a system maximum of 32GB. The server also offers mass storage and media support of up to four 73GB 2.5-inch, 10K rpm SAS disks, providing a maximum capacity of 292GB, officials say.

The Sun Fire T1000 will become available for delivery in March 2006, and U.S. pricing starts at $2,995, also when acquired with Sun's System Ready Plan. The T1000 offers eight available memory slots that can provide users with up to 16GB of DDR2 SDRAM memory, officials say. The server comes with four 10/100/1000-Mbps Ethernet ports. The T1000 can deliver up to 32 simultaneous execution threads in a lower wattage environment, officials say.

While purchase orders from Wall Street may not be immediately piling up at Sun, the product news helped push Sun's stock upward (see page 9).