The Sun/Fujitsu collaboration is moving along at a steady clip, unveiling its second major enterprise server product within a month.

The M3000 server is an entry-level SPARC machine sporting a single quad-core SPARC64 VII processor and loaded with the Solaris 10 OS. The companies say it delivers enterprise-level RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) in an ultra-dense open framework at a starting price of $15,000.

The 3000 offers many of the same features found on the higher-end M4000, 5000 and 8000 machines, which also use the SPARC64 VII. The unit offers the Simultaneous Multi-Threading chip architecture, as well as PCI Express and SAS I/O interfaces, hardware-level instruction retry, dynamic cache-memory degradation and extended error checking and correction (ECC).

Fujitsu and Sun have had a lengthy co-development relationship, but the two have been on a tear lately. Earlier this month, they released the T5440 aimed at energy-efficient operation. And they say they are planning a new generation of machines using the 2.8 GHz SPARC64, as well as a new line of UltraSPARC processors, for 2009.