Sun introduced its new "industry-standard" 64-bit server line today in New York City. The company hopes that its new AMD based server series will compete with server market giants Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Sun estimates the worth of the targeted server market to be in the area of $17.5 billion, which makes their venture into the sector quite understandable.
The Sun Fire X2100 is a single processor server which starts at $745. It comes equipped with 512MB RAM and an Opteron 146 processor, all running Sun"s Solaris 10 OS. The Sun Fire X4100 and Sun Fire X4200 both ship with 1GB RAM and a single Opteron 248 processor, as well as Solaris 10. The X4100 and X4200 start at $2195 and $2595 respectively. The new servers were designed by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, who left the company in 1995, and then returned when Sun bought his server company Kealia in February 2004. Sun had originally promised the once codenamed "Galaxy" servers the first half of this year.
Sun was tight-lipped about its upcoming high-end server lines utilizing its own processors.