Sun doubles partitioning capacity of Starfire systems

Sun, Palo Alto, Calif., has been chipping away at the data center market share held by rival IBM Corp.'s System 390 mainframe series.

The two platforms against which Sun faces its stiffest competition in the logical partitioning arena are System 390 and IBM's AS/400, which offers logical partitioning technology with its OS/400 operating system.

Sun's differentiation comes with its dynamic system domains, Enns said. The functionality allows information technology workers to "move a resource from one domain to another, such as a system board, without having to restart the system. It's completely transparent to the user," he said.

"IBM sees the tremendous acceptance and demand for this capability in other servers," Enns said. "They brought it into the AS/400. This is, frankly, rocket science. This is hard to do."

With the new Starfire, Sun is offering the capability to take one or more of the 16 available partitions and have it loaded with the Linux operating system-an almost-free competitor to Sun's proprietary Solaris operating system that runs on the Starfire servers, Enns said.

This option also is available for the units that provide eight partitions, which already are available. However, a limited number of accounts have taken advantage of the capability to load and run Linux on the high-end Sun machines, he said.

"I know there are not that many [accounts] doing that," Enns said. "Starfire is really a data-center-class system. It's not where you tend to find Linux."