Manufacturer Oracle Corporation Retail availability 1998–2003 | Units sold 500K+ | |
Release date February 1998 (1998-02) | ||
The Ultra 60 is a fairly large and heavy computer workstation in a tower enclosure from Sun Microsystems. The Ultra 60 was launched in November 1997 and shipped with Solaris 7. It was available in several specifications.
Contents
The Ultra 60 is similar to the higher-cost Sun Ultra 80, but is somewhat smaller and supports fewer CPUs and less memory. The Ultra 60 may be rack-mounted using an optional kit (X9627A or 560-2548) although they were generally not rack-mounted, since the Ultra 60 was designed for use as a workstation rather than a server. Details can be found in the Sun Ultra 80 Rack Mount Installation Guide. The Enterprise 220R is an Ultra 60 motherboard in a specialized rackmount case with custom power supplies and other parts.
The Ultra 60 is no longer sold new and was replaced by the Ultra 45, although the Ultra 45 can only take two CPUs, rather than the four of the Ultra 80. The last order date for the Ultra 60 was July 2002 and the last model to be shipped was in 2003, so it is now considered by Sun to be end of life.
Operating system
Although it shipped with Solaris 7, the Ultra 60 will run later versions of Solaris up to 10, as well as Linux and various other UNIX operating systems. The Ultra 60 can not run Microsoft Windows directly, although an internal PCI card (SunPCi II pro and similar) from Sun could be fitted to allow the use of Windows.
Power consumption
According to the hardware specifications on the Sun web site, the maximum power consumption is 380 W. The components list lists the power supply (Sun part number 300-1357) as a Sony 670 W 12A power supply. A well fitted system (2x450MHz, 2GB memory, Elite3D graphics, one disk) draws about 200 watts when idle.
Reducing Power
Remove 2nd video card and 2nd CPU.
Construction quality
The Ultra 60 is a well built workstation. It does not use cheap mass-produced commodity PC parts like other Ultra workstations such as the Ultra 5 and Ultra 10. It is well cooled, suffering none of the problems of overheating like Sun's previous quad processor machine, the SPARCstation 20.
Support
The Ultra 60 is no longer sold new, but it is Sun's policy to support hardware for 5 years from the date of last shipment, so the Ultra 60 was officially supported until October 2007. In addition to official support, knowledgeable people (often Sun employees) are regular visitors to the comp.unix.solaris, comp.sys.sun.hardware and comp.sys.sun.admin Usenet newsgroups.
OS
Benchmarks
These are ultra 80 benchmarks, need to find ultra 60.
The Sun Ultra 80 Workstation - Just The Facts guide, gives the following data for the well known SPECint 95 and SPECfp 95 benchmarks, although a search of the web site of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) does not show these figures. SPEC ceased use of the benchmark before the Ultra 80 was released, so the last results submitted to their web site are in the 3rd quarter of 1998, a little over a year before the Ultra 80 was released in November 1999.
A number of results for the less well used SPECfp_rate95 and SPECfp_rate_base95 benchmarks can be found on the SPEC web site and are given below.