Sun today launched a slew of new Sun Fire systems based on the quad-core, virtualization-friendly Intel Xeon 5500 series of processors. Sun provides this helpful breakdown of where in the data center their new gear slots in:

Virtualization:

• Sun Fire X4270 server – A best value for consolidation and virtualization in a dense 2RU form factor for branch office and departmental settings as well as for horizontally scaled data center consolidation needs.
• Sun Blade X6270 server module – Provides up to 2x more I/O throughput than competing blade servers and provides an all-in-one virtualization solution, including server and network, when combined with the Sun Virtual Network Express Module (NEM).

Enterprise and Web:

• Sun Fire X4170 server – Delivers the performance of a 4U system in a compact 1U form factor with savings of up to 75 percent in rack space, while consuming 60 percent less energy at half the price of competing 4 socket, 4 RU systems.
• Sun Fire X2270 server – Offers 3x the performance at 66 percent the energy consumption of current generation systems. The most compact server in its class, the Sun Fire x2270 server delivers savings of up to 50 percent in data center real estate.
• Sun Fire X4275 server – An ideal server for the most demanding streaming multimedia applications, delivering 12TB of raw storage at less than $1/GB of storage, with significant space and energy savings.
• Sun Ultra 27 workstation – The only workstation in its class to support the NVIDIA FX5800, the Ultra 27 workstation offers virtually unmatched visualization performance in its class with up to 12GB of main memory and 4GB of graphics memory.

High Performance Computing:

• Sun Blade X6275 server module – The first blade server to support onboard quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand for extreme performance and power efficiency for HPC applications. The Sun Blade X6275 server modules push the limits of performance, providing up to nine TeraFLOPS of peak performance in a fully populated Sun Blade 6048 chassis. Optional Sun Flash Modules provide 24GB of high performance, efficient and reliable storage per node.

Add solid-state drives to the mix, and you’re on your way to lower power consumption and blazing I/O’s:

Sun is the only vendor to offer SSDs across all platforms and the first and only company to deliver systems with onboard Flash modules. These next generation storage technologies help eliminate I/O bottlenecks and further improve application performance. With SSD integration across software, systems and storage, customers can achieve up to 70x faster response times, up to eight times better throughput, and up to 38 percent less power consumption than servers with traditional spinning hard disk drives.

You can catch tons of videos related to the announcement here.

Source: Press Release