Stories about: Niagara

IBM is introducing a new feature of its recently released Power6 processor that makes it possible to move a Unix-based computer workload from one server to another while it is running.

Sun Microsystems hopes its new UltraSparc T2 processor, officially launched Tuesday, will earn it repeat business from existing telecommunications customers and attract new customers looking for a way to make their networks run faster.

Sun Microsystems, in its continual rollout of processors from its new Microelectronics division, is making a multithreaded chip for various embedded and mobile devices.

Sun is delivering on its promise, made last October, to roll out a new form of virtualization, which it is calling logical domains or LDoms.

In 1973, Pete Townshend and The Who wrote and sang about Quadrophenia. And although it took another 34 years for quad-core servers to be counted as a commercial success, by all accounts, multicore server evolution is just beginning.

The agreement by Sun Microsystems and Intel to work together on product development, announced Monday, will bring improvements in how Solaris operates on Intel's chips, according to John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president for systems. Those improvements will arrive in OpenSolaris, the open source version of the company's operating system. Under the new agreement, Sun will begin selling Intel-based systems while the two companies work to optimize Solaris on Intel's platforms. Fowler talked about the agreement and what it means after the deal was unveiled. Excerpts from that interview follow:

Sun Microsystems is moving forward with plans to develop a processor with as many as 16 cores on one piece of silicon, quadruple the capacity available now.

Within days of launching the "fastest blade server on the planet", Sun Microsystems has revealed plans to introduce a subscription service in Australia that provides customers with automatic refreshes of server hardware.

Hoping to make inroads in the high-growth blade segment of the server market, Sun Microsystems has released a new blade along with a U.S. subscription service offering customers several automatic refreshes of the server hardware.

Sun Microsystems next year plans to introduce the Advanced Product Line (APL), a family of UltraSparc-based data centre servers that are being developed jointly with Fujitsu.

The server market remains strong but industry research shows unit shipment rates slowing as companies buy fewer, but more powerful, machines.