The Enterprise 10000, or Starfire (a development codename also used for marketing purposes) was a high-end multiprocessor datacenter server capable of being configured with up to 64 UltraSPARC II processors. This was largely designed by Cray Research's Business Systems Division as a successor to the Cray Superserver 6400, itself related to Sun's earlier Sun-4d architecture servers. After Cray was acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1996, this division was sold on to Sun, who then launched the Starfire as the Ultra Enterprise 10000 in 1997.
The Starfire was based around the fault-tolerant Gigaplane-XB processor/memory interconnect. Like the X000 and X500 series servers, the Starfire incorporated many high-availability features, including the ability to be partitioned into multiple "domains", each of which could be booted individually to run its own instance of Solaris. It is also possible to remove resource from running domain with short notice and reassign freed resources to other domain. Domain granularity is one CPU board (single system may have 1-16 of them). A single CPU board can carry up to 4 processors, 4GB of RAM and 4 SBUS IO boards. A rare option was to replace 4 SBUS boards with dual PCI boards. The Starfire was the first server from any vendor to exceed 2000 on the TPC-D 300 GB benchmark. Starfire systems were used by a number of high-profile customers during the "dot-com" boom, notably eBay, and typically sold for well over $1 million for a fully configured system.
The Starfire contains one or two controller modules which are connected via Ethernet to an external computer, the System Service Processor (SSP). The controller modules interface with the system "centerplane" via JTAG and control the partitioning of available CPUs, memory and I/O devices into one or more domains, each of which is in effect a distinct computer. The system cannot be partitioned or booted without its original SSP which contains encrypted keys issued by the manufacturer.
The Starfire was superseded by the Sun Fire 12K/15K models.
Read more about this topic: Sun Enterprise
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