Soul of a new standard server

Andy Bechtolsheim, one among the group of Stanford University students who founded Sun Microsystems, invented the original Sun workstation and guided many subsequent computers into production. Bechtolsheim left Sun in 1995 to start Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet networking company that Cisco Systems later acquired; he then went on to co-found Kealia, an advanced server startup that Sun acquired last year. Since then, as Sun's chief architect and senior vice president of network systems, Bechtolsheim has been busy designing the AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire x64 servers -- better known by their code name, Galaxy. (See InfoWorld's review of a preproduction version of the Galaxy here.) Just prior to the Galaxy launch, Bechtolsheim talked with InfoWorld Test Center Chief Technologist Tom Yager about Galaxy's design, Sun's server strategy, CPU architectures, virtualization, and the future of Sparc. (See Yager's analysis of the Galaxy here.)

IW: What brought you back to Sun? What was the genesis of the Galaxy design?

AB: I left Sun in 1995 to start a networking company that Cisco later acquired. At that time, I was fascinated by the Gigabit Ethernet network opportunity, and I didn't see that Sun, as a server company, could pursue that. Similarly, about a year or two ago, when I first heard about the Opteron CPU, I was [drawn] by the market opportunity that would create. Obviously it's too late for a startup in the server space, so my little startup company was pursuing a vertical market segment: video servers. But it was clear that the best use of this technology was within a large server company. When Sun announced publicly that they were going to use the Opteron architecture, it was an obvious match.

Sun's previous efforts in the industry standard space were based on OEMing white boxes from Asia. To build differentiation, or to add value to a server, you have to design something better than the mainstream. Since our return to Sun, that's what we've focused on. The real change to the company is we've added an engineering department to focus on building enhanced systems in the industry standard space that are totally Sun designed.

IW: What did you hope to achieve?

AB: What we focused on in this Galaxy system is performance, and we are proud to report that these boxes deliver the industry best performance for the industry standard architecture. This was achieved through a combination of the dual-core technology from AMD but also by supporting a higher power version of the Opteron chip in these systems. And [Galaxy] is still vastly more power efficient -- roughly twice as power efficient -- than what the competition has.

This new CPU allows us to get benchmark results that exceed the Xeon MP four-way box. To put this in context, the Intel four-way system is, of course depending on the vendor, a 3U or 4U box. Our box is either 1U or 2U and costs half as much and [consumes] one-third the power. It doesn't look very good for Intel, I have to say, in terms of comparing the Xeon MP to the dual-core Opteron.