I spent some time vendor pavilion at JavaOne today. One of the vendors that I spent some time pick on was Sun. In particular, I had hardware on the brain toady, and I managed to track down like, the one person at Sun's booth, who could speak about the present and future of the UltraSparc line. In addition, this fellow was there to talk about the V20z, so I asked him a few questions about that as well.

Regarding the UltraSparc, both the UltraSparc IV and UltraSparc IIIi are currently shipping. The UltraSparc IV has both CMT (Chip Multi-Threading, sort of like Intel's Hyperthreading, but better according to Sun) and multiple cores per CPU. It sounds pretty hot. Unfortunately, it seems like it is only going to appear in Sun's higher-end servers (5U and up), in high densities. The Sun person that I spoke to wasn't sure if it would ever materialize in a workstation, but was doubtful.

The UltraSparc IV is going after highly-parallelized workloads, as is the rest of the industry. However, my group at EDS is working with some applications that are stuck on Sparc, and aren't highly parallel. So, it seems like we're going to be using the UltraSparc III series for awhile. The good news is that the UltraSparc III is up to 1.6Ghz in speed now, which is not too shabby (for a RISC CPU).

Moving on to the V20z, I cut right to the chase on this one. i knew that the only reason to buy an X86-based server from Sun would be for the management features. Luckily, I was not disappointed. The V20z has two Ethernet interfaces for the purposes of management. Even better, once you configure an IP on the Ethernet, you can SSH to it, and get full access to the serial console (OS), or the internal management console! That sold me right there. In addition, the management Ethernet ports can act as a hub, which means that you can daisy chain a rack of servers together, and only take up one switch port for management. That is really, really cool. One thing is that you have to use crossover cables, because the management ports don't support auto MDI-X (while the main GigE interfaces do).

I don't really keep up with the state-of-the-art for PC servers, but I don't think that you can do SSH management of them. Sun is definitely kicking ass here.

-Andy.