Sun, a maker of servers and workstations, Monday introduced its first 4-way AMD Opteron-based server aimed at high-end server market. Separately the company also rolled-out a pair of workstations based on AMD Opteron microprocessors leveraging the company’s x86-64 product portfolio.

The introduction continues Sun’s trend to use industry-standard components in conjunction with its own Solaris operating system along with software. With more powerful server machines featuring up to four AMD Opteron processors clocked at up to 2.40GHz Sun continues its fight against server makers HP and Dell, who managed to outrun Sun in terms of market share starting from the late nineties as a result of Sun’s non-recognition of industry-standard x86 processors.

Sun’s Fire v40z server can be equipped with up to 32GB of DDR SDRAM memory with ECC and ChipKill at PC2700 (333MHz) speed. Current Sun offers AMD’s Opteron 844, 848 or 850 chips for its v40z. The machine also features four 64-bit/133MHz, one 64-bit/100MHz, one half-length 64-bit/100MHz and one half-length 64-bit/66MHz PCI-X slots. Additionally, the new Fire server has 2 Gigabit Ethernet network controllers, up to six hot-swappable 3.5”x1.0” Ultra320 SCSI drives and so on.

Sun recommends to use Solaris 9 for x86 systems, Red Hat Linux 3 for AMD Opteron or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for AMD Opteron operating systems. The company may also install SUSE Linux 9 Professional, Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 under special requests on its v40z servers.

Base configurations of Sun Fire v40z server includes variety of models, the basic flavor is equipped with two AMD Opteron 844 chips at $8495, the most powerful incarnation is based on four AMD Opteron 850 microprocessors and costs $27 995. The machines are available immediately

Workstations based on 1 (w1100z) or 2 (w2100z) AMD64 processors are also shipping today starting from $1995 and $4695 price-points.