Sun and Fujitsu Sitting in a Tree

In the server business market, Sparc processors have been around since the dawn of ages, but there have always been other competitors that took away from the processors' pride, there was IBM's Power PCs, Intel's Xeon and AMD's Opteron processors that put out a good fight, just enough for people to take their eyes away from the important things.

Fujitsu's dual-core, dual-threaded Sparc64 VI �Olympus� is the base of a partnership between them and Sun which has helped them put together the Advanced Product Line (APL), later renamed to the Sparc Enterprise Server line.

Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said: "Had UltraSparc IV+ had less legs than it's proven to have, had APL been earlier, had Rock been later than it appears it's going to be, APL would have been more important to Sun. As it is, it's a nice product update that Sun got without a whole lot of money and effort."

Now Sun has the UltraSparc T1 �Niagara�-based servers and a new line of servers based on the �Rock� processor, which Sun Microsystems CEO and president, Jonathan Schwartz, announced on his blog a couple of days ago. The last series of servers is expected to ship in the second half of 2008. The Sparc Enterprise Server series is based on two main components: Olympus-based systems and Sun's Niagara-based systems. The servers from the Olympus line are �the four-processor M4000, eight-processor M5000, 16-processor M8000, and the M9000-32 and M9000-64, with 32 and 64 processors, respectively,� and will run Sun Solaris 10.

Graham Kelley, senior director of server product marketing for Fujitsu Computer Systems said: "We expect to gain some share with these products. The target is HP and IBM."