Sun Unveils New Servers

Sun Microsystems is expected to unveil the first members of its long-awaited "industry-standard" 64-bit server family at its quarterly product rollout in New York City Monday.

Formerly code-named Galaxy, the Sun Fire X2100, X4100, and X4200 servers represent the company's bid to woo customers, particularly the financial industry sector, away from rival server vendors Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

"We're entering a new marketplace and will grow very fast," Larry Singer, vice president, global information systems strategy at Sun, said in an interview Friday. He estimated that what Sun is calling the industry-standard server market is worth about $17.5 billion. "We will be the lead player," he added.

The Sun Fire servers run on Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors. The Sun Fire X2100 is a single-socket rack-mounted server, the X4100 a two-way machine, and the X4200 a four-way server. Sun also plans to preview future members of its new 64-bit Opteron-based family, notably an eight-processor, dual-core midrange server, Singer said, PC World reported.