Sun Fire 15K

The Sun Fire 15K (codenamed "Starcat") is an enterprise-class server computer from Sun Microsystems. General availability was in January 2002; the last to be shipped was in May 2005. It has been superseded by the Sun Fire E25K.

The Sun Fire 15K supported up to 106 UltraSPARC III processors (up to 1.2 GHz), or 72 UltraSPARC IVs (up to 1.35 GHz). With the UltraSPARC III, Sun supported two socket "MaxCPU" processor cards in place of I/O mezzanine cards. UltraSPARC IV does not support MaxCPU cards. Maximum physical RAM per system is 576 GB. A maximum of 72 PCI I/O slots are available.

The system can be divided into a maximum of 18 secure independent domains, each of which is a separate machine with its own filesystems, root password and can run different versions of the Solaris operating system. Administrators can dynamically change the assignment of RAM and processors to the different domains to meet changes in business needs. In addition, the 15K contains two system controllers (duplicated for redundancy), which are Solaris systems used to manage the 15K and perform tasks such as booting and shutting down domains and assigning CPUs and RAM to domains. The 15K contains minimal storage in itself (only system controller boot disks); it is connected to a separate enterprise storage system such as a Sun StorEdge 99xx model.

References

*cite news|title=Sun Takes on the Mainframe With Sun Fire 15K |author=Newman, Amy|date=September 24, 2001|publisher=Server Watch|url=http://www.serverwatch.com/news/article.php/1400741