Short Items of Interest on Sun Servers
Sun Solution Increased User and IT Productivity, Security and Added Easy Remote Access
In September 2008, medical products maker ResMed decided to replace 160 PCs with Sun Ray 2 Thin Clients, and purchased two SPARC Enterprise T2000 Servers with chip multithreading, and four Sun Fire X4440 Servers to support its new solution. According to ResMed, IT productivity has increased by the equivalent of two additional IT staff, and the company has saved about $267,850. The Sun solution also increased security and substantially reduced energy costs as well as the noise-level.
Games to Rely on Wide Array of Hardware, Software, Consulting Services from Sun
Sun Microsystems of Canada will be responsible for managing the IT infrastructure supporting the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) in Vancouver, Canada. The assignment entails connecting 15 networked venues and three datacenters, running multiple business applications and an integration test lab, and keeping 10,000 media outlets up to date with over 100 TB of data. This technology infrastructure will handle daily operations as well as share real-time data with billions worldwide.
Highly Secure Email Service Runs on Scalable Data Storage and Backup Platform
Correos is the operator of the public postal service in Spain. Recently, it decided to build a secure email service for up to 140,000 mailboxes for citizens and businesses to send emails and attachments to government offices. With the support of Sun Professional Services, Correos designed and implemented a fully redundant data storage and backup platform for its new email service based on Sun Fire servers and Sun StorageTek technology.
Includes Sun Fire X4170 and X4270 and Sun Blade X6270 
Sun Fire X4170 and X4270 Servers along with the Sun Blade X6270 Server Modules are to offer 500 GB 7.2K RPM, 2.5-inch SATA disk drive with Marlin brackets. The 500 GB SATA disk drive provides greater on-board storage capacity making these Sun Fire and Sun Blade servers even better equipped to handle data-intensive applications.
Virtualization Benchmark Measures Performance, Scalability 
The Sun Fire X4270 server running VMware ESX 4.0 OS earned an excellent result on the virtualization benchmark VMmark from VMware for 8 core platforms. The Sun x64 server delivers near linear scalability under the heavy load conditions of the VMmark benchmark, whose purpose is to measure performance and scalability of a pre-established mix of workloads (a Tile), which allows comparisons among similar platforms.
Portfolio Adds New Technologies to Price List
The Sun Partner Advantage Program for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) has some new development hardware offerings that include Sun Ultra 27 Assemble to Order (ATO); Sun Fire X2270, X4170 X4270, and X4275 Servers ATO; standard configurations for the Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000, T5120, T5140, T5220, and T5240 Servers; among others. As part of this program, qualified Sun partners are able to purchase products, such as these, at discounted rates.
Depends on the OS, Apparently
Curious about the impact of virtualization on benchmarking results? Jan Brosowski blogged in SAPonSun about testing two “half-box” virtual machines on the same box. He discovered a striking difference.
Sun Fire X4170, X4270 and X4275 Servers Stake Strong Claim Among Competitors 
Writing in ZDNet Asia, Alan Stevens describes the 2U Sun Fire X4270 and Sun Fire X4275 servers. He notes that they are essentially the same machines, with exactly the same chassis, identical motherboards, processor and memory options. The only real difference is in the storage: the X4270 has sixteen 2.5in. hot-swap drive bays, whereas the X4275 offers twelve 3.5in. drive bays and a choice of drives in capacities up to 2TB per spindle. A review of the Sun Fire X4170 in eWeek also voices praise for this member of the family.
Noted as Impressive Entries into the Nehalem-based Server Market 
The Sun Fire X2270 and X4270 servers “… are the fastest x64 servers Sun has ever produced,” writes Paul Venezia in his InfoWorld review. He states that both models are impressive entries into the Nehalem-based server market and would like to see them survive the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.
