Sun Fire X4500, world's first hybrid data server

Meet the world's first hybrid data server.

Creating a new compute category, the Sun Fire X4500 Server includes integrated server and storage technologies and is being called the best server for Web 2.0, the next wave of the Internet. The Sun Fire X4500 Server is one of three new enterprise systems Sun introduced on July 11.

Web 2.0 encompasses a second generation of online services built on wide-scale sharing and participation. At Sun's product announcement last week, Tim O'Reilly, president and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., described Web 2.0 as "systems that get smarter the more people use them."

O'Reilly calls Google the prototypical Web 2.0 service, but notes that the company "did it the hard way - they have kind of rolled their own." Many companies now emulate the Google model, yet they "don't want to roll their own, or grow [their infrastructure] from the ground up."

That's where the Sun Fire X4500 Server makes such a difference. "This is the Web 2.0 server," says O'Reilly. "[The Sun Fire X4500 Server] doesn't quite fit into any existing category, and I really think it's the category of the future. Now companies can get hardware like this and build next-generation applications."

"Sun is clearly not just in the x64 space," says Jonathan Eunice, one of the founders of industry analyst firm RedMonk. "It is innovating there--and with gusto."

Scott Yara, CEO, Greenplum and Tim O'Reilly, CEO and Founder, O'Reilly Media, Inc. - Watch the Video

Hybrid Server, High Performance

The Sun Fire X4500 Server (code-named Thumper) brings together state-of-the-art server and storage technologies in a single box to deliver high-performance I/O. The server combines a four-way x64 server with up to 48 disk drives and 24TB of storage. Those specs yield a storage cost starting as low as $2/GB.

And because the Sun Fire X4500 Server comes bundled with Solaris ZFS, you can count on data integrity across very large datasets. "One of the most exciting things to see is companies joining massively parallel databases," says Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun chief architect and designer of the Sun Fire X4500 Server. "This new machine has a cost-performance that people could only dream about until now."

Those efficiencies are far-reaching, according to Ian Dwyer, Oracle's Senior Director of Global Alliances. Dwyer sees the launch of the Sun Fire X4500 Server as a real-estate announcement, not simply a hardware announcement: "You don't have to acquire new data centers to use this latest high-performance technology. Likewise, you're seeing greater energy efficiency, thereby reducing costs."

"Beautiful Machine"

When the Tokyo Institute of Technology set out to build one of the world's fastest supercomputers, it turned to Sun. Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, the Institute's Head of Research Infrastructure, led the project, and he spoke at last week's product announcements to tell the story of the supercomputer.

Getting to the desired level of performance required the compute grid be fed an astonishing amount of data. To store that data, and make it accessible at the speed needed by an HPC environment, the Institute's grid relies on Sun Fire X4500 servers.

The supercomputer operates at a capacity of 85 trillion floating point operations per second, or teraflops, making it the seventh-fastest supercomputer in the world.

"It's such a beautiful machine," says Matsuoka.

Systems Innovation

For Hector Ruiz, chairman and CEO of AMD, the Sun Fire X4500 Server is impressive: "This new class of products, a server and storage hybrid, will dramatically change how people address and solve their problems. I'm sort of in awe by the tremendous work Sun's engineering team has done and very proud that AMD x64 [processors] are a part of it."

Sun innovation extends to every level of a system. "When we develop a system, we look at every possible way we can attack customer problems because we have the breadth and depth of R&D to do that," said Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz at the launch of the Sun Fire X4500 Server. "These systems are true innovations, and they give customers what they are looking for."