Power savings, open source make Sun servers attractive

In London at one of Sun Microsystems’ near-simultaneous world wide press events to launch new servers based on the Niagara chips, Sun is touting the servers’ low power consumption, the new Try and Buy program, and a planned open source initiative.

Some of the plans are attractive to potential users but others are nothing new, some customers say.

Sun is holding press events in London and other cities on Tuesday to launch its Sun Fire servers based on the multicore, multithread UltraSparc chip, codenamed Niagara.

Low power consumption and a small form factor are exactly why the University of Cambridge is interested in the new servers, said Andrew Batey, an IT manager for the university’s Institute of Astronomy. “We can’t expand the building we use because we’re in the city center,” he said. That means that adding large servers that require additional air-conditioning power is not an option. Also, as a university, Batey’s department is always looking for low-cost options so the savings the department can realize by using less power to fuel the servers is also attractive, he said.

Batey is also interested in the potential to use any operating system on the servers, even one that might be created in-house. That’s possible since Sun executives here said that the servers will run a range of operating systems, including open-source software.

While Batey’s department doesn’t have any specific plans to create its own operating system for the servers, the option is attractive, he said. “We’ll get to a limit on hardware,” Batey noted. At that point, software will be increasingly important for adding new capabilities.

With the launch of the Niagara servers, Sun is instituting a Try and Buy program, where potential customers can try out a server for 90 days and can then decide to buy or return the server. “We hope that people get hooked,” said Hellmuth Broda, distinguished director and European chief technology officer for Sun’s Corporate Strategic Insight Office.

Batey said that program doesn’t sound much different than common practice historically at Sun. “They’re good a loaning units anyway,” he said. That’s important for Batey because he often needs to prove the capability of a product before he can get approval to buy it. “The people I need to convince are academics and they just need to know if it’s faster and the only way to prove that is to run it,” he said.

Broda confirmed that some programs written by third parties may need to be altered to run on the new servers. Applications that have been written for mono-threaded situations, with no parallelism in the application — such as some number-crunching applications — will have to be rewritten to be run on the Sun Fire servers, Broda said. “Anything where the application follows one line of thought or one problem is not so ideal for multithreading,” he said.

But Batey said that he’d expect to have to tweak any program that might be ported onto any new server so that drawback isn’t significant. Sun has historically been quite helpful when Batey has looked for help in making such changes, he said.

Batey was at the event in London to evaluate whether his department would buy the new servers. He said he was impressed with what he saw but the ultimate decision would be based on the deal Sun offered.