Sun 'SPARCs' Up Processing

The UltraSparc T1, formerly code-named Niagara, marks a new direction for Sun: The chips are said to couple high performance with lower power consumption, helping tap into the kind of favorable “price performance per watt” ratio data center customers are looking for today. Running at between 60 and 70 watts, the T1s are expected to show up in Sun servers aimed at the Web server market in the next couple of months.

The T1 is able to accomplish power savings by bulking up on lower-speed cores—the processors run at 1GHz or 1.2GHz—and by making use of Solaris and Java&'s native multithreading capabilities. The T1 can handle up to four threads per core. Most processors can natively handle only one thread per core.

Solution providers characterized the launch of new T1-based servers as significant for Sun and said customer interest is high. As data centers expand, heat and power consumption are becoming serious issues. Solution providers are looking for ways to consolidate servers in the data center with a speedy, lower-power box. But with eight cores, software licensing may be a sticking point for the T1.

Sun, Santa Clara, Calif., currently is migrating all of its software licensing to a per-socket charge or a flat $125-per-employee rate. But others have not moved as quickly. For example, Oracle currently charges 75 percent of one software license per core for processors with more than two cores. That means Oracle&'s typical $40,000 database license would cost $30,000 for each T1 core, or $240,000 to run on an entry-level T1 server.

“Customers are saying they would love to go to a new technology that makes sense, but they want to know what the software is going to cost them,” said Ed Gogol, director of enterprise systems at Solarcom, a Norcross, Ga.-based Sun solution provider.

Gogol noted that an eight-core processor isn&'t going to deliver the same performance as eight separate single-core systems and so it would be nearly impossible to get customers to purchase eight separate software licenses in order to run a database on the server.