Sun Announces ft-SPARC; An Open, Fault-Tolerant Platform For The Telecommunications Industry; Meets CO Requirements; Runs Standard Solaris Applications

Business Wire, June 25, 1996

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 25, 1996--Sun Microsystems today unveiled its ft-SPARC(TM) fault-tolerant platform, meeting the needs of the telecommunications industry for a system providing continuous availability and compliance with industry standards, while maintaining full compatibility with the Sun(TM) Solaris(TM) operating environment. By using ft-SPARC as the platform for intelligent network applications, telecommunications equipment manufacturers and their service provider customers can eliminate the frequent compromises in openness, availability and price/performance with proprietary or general purpose servers.

Announced here at Supercomm `96, the addition of ft-SPARC to what is already the industry's most scalable line of high- performance, open network servers - now from workgroup to fault-tolerant systems - clearly positions Sun as an ideal platform for the telecommunications industry. Sun technology meets telco infrastructure requirements to support central office (CO) applications, operations support systems, Intelligent Network applications and Internet services.

"These high-performance fault-tolerant systems will meet the growing demand from telecommunication equipment manufacturers and service providers who are deploying mission-critical network elements such as Intelligent Network, Internet firewalls, and CDR applications," said Al Dei Maggi, director of sales and business development at Sun's fault-tolerant systems business unit. "Our telecommunications customers will now have access to a market-proven, fault-tolerant environment supplied and serviced directly by Sun."

Sun's two new ft-SPARC systems are designed to continue operating even when modules fail, ensuring levels of system availability that far exceed those delivered by conventional or high-availability systems. Since many telco applications have already been developed on the Solaris platform, the addition of the ft-SPARC family means that Sun's customers can accelerate time-to-market schedules and reduce overall development costs by deploying their mission-critical applications, unmodified, on this same platform.

Sun's new ft-SPARC models, the 1500 and 1600, result from Sun's acquisition earlier this year of Integrated Micro Products (IMP), a U.K.-based supplier of fault-tolerant systems for the telecommunications industry. IMP now operates as a business unit of Sun Microsystems Computer Company.

The IMP acquisition is one of several recent moves by Sun to increase its presence in the commercial IT marketplace. In April, Sun launched its Ultra(TM) Enterprise(TM) line of servers for corporate networks; also earlier this spring, Sun announced its intent to acquire the SPARC/Solaris-related assets from Cray Research Inc., including its powerful CS6400 64-processor system.

Fully Redundant Design

The ft-SPARC fault-tolerant modular design provides full redundancy in every element, ensuring no single point of failure - a key criterion for a truly fault-tolerant system. If a module fails, a redundant module continues to operate and notifies the user of the faulty component. Modules can be replaced while the system is running, without special knowledge or tools. Among the features that give these Sun systems an extremely high level of availability are fault-tolerant processor modules, I/O subsystems, mirrored disks, hot-pluggable modules, redundant power systems, powerful configuration management and reporting software.

The ft-SPARC 1500 is a stand-alone server configuration, while the ft-SPARC 1600 (which uses a 48-volt power supply) is a rack-mounted unit designed for telco central office applications. Systems are available supporting one-, two- or four-way multiprocessing. The system operates on the Solaris 2.4 operating environment, allowing it to run thousands of existing Solaris applications unmodified.

Sun's ft-SPARC systems incorporate the following redundancy features:

-- Fault-tolerant core. This consists of two processor/memory subsystems (CpuSets) each containing one to four 80 MHz SuperSPARC(TM) II processors. This dual CpuSet configuration provides continuous operation in the event of failure. Because the fault tolerance is hardware-based, failures are transparent to the application software.

-- Redundant I/O and disk subsystems. The I/O subsystem is fully redundant, based on dual fault-tolerant input/output buses. The disk subsystems are configured as a mirrored pair, ensuring data can always flow to and from the CpuSet. Unlike most RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disk) systems, which allow a single point of failure by using only a single controller and bus, this system's fully redundant mirrored disk subsystems insures there is no single point of failure. Fault tolerant device drivers ensure continued I/O operation in the event of a failure.

-- Modular design. ft-SPARC's modular design using hot-pluggable modules allows removal and replacement of failed modules without bringing the system down.

-- Power subsystems. Each power module powers both buses. The system uses an "n 1" design, which is a cost-effective way of ensuring the system can continue to operate in the event of failure of a power supply.