The business value contribution of IT investments depends in part on the cost of purchasing necessary processing capacity (i.e., throughput) and the cost of operating a datacenter. If more powerful servers were also smaller, consumed less electrical power, and demanded less cooling, then the business value contribution of IT would improve. Power, heat dissipation, and datacenter square footage are significant costs, and IT departments are adding more servers to meet rising demand for computing services.
Sun Microsystems has announced new Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers. These servers use the new Sun UltraSPARC T1 processor, which contains up to 8 cores and can manage up to 32 processing threads. Multicore, multithread processors can achieve higher throughput because they provide a better balance between processor clock speeds and memory access latencies. Without multithreading, processor clock cycles are often wasted while the faster processor waits for data to arrive from memory.
The UltraSPARC T1 processor consumes less electrical power than the earlier UltraSPARC IIIi processor, thus reversing a trend across the industry. Lower power, less heat to dissipate, and higher compute density are a powerful combination of factors.
IDC believes that the move to multicore, multithreaded processors is a paradigm shift for Sun and for the industry. Sun has taken a truly different approach to processor design and described a new and better road map for datacenter managers. Extending the life of datacenters without investment in costly refurbishments to accommodate thermal and power demands is yet another cost savings that will be reflected in improved business value.
The Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers run the Solaris operating system and are binary compatible with previous Sun processors. As a result, ISVs and existing customers can move software to these new platforms without recompilation. IDC encourages IT organizations deploying high-density computing solutions for the Web tier to evaluate these new servers based on the SPARC T1 processor. The new servers from Sun should be considered for use outside the normal workload boundaries commonly associated with this form factor.
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