Sun Is Back With Blades

The company launched its Sun Blade Modular 8000 system, one of three servers based on AMD's x64 processors unveiled on Tuesday. The other two servers are rack-based systems; the SunFire X4600 is a four-way server that can scale to 16 ways, while the SunFire 4500 is an integrated server and storage system that supports up to 24 TB of capacity.

The arrival of the blade server comes after Hewlett-Packard and IBM refreshed their respective offerings and are enjoying a healthy share of the blade market.

Sun had opted to pull out of the blade market several years ago following a lackluster performance. It decided not to re-enter the business until it could come up with an offering that is comparable with its rack-mounted systems. At Sun's launch event in San Francisco, company officials say they believe its new blade entry will provide that parity.

"We are opening up a new era in the blade marketplace, which is what we consider to be no compromise," said John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's systems group. "Until today, if you chose to purchase blade system computers, you had to compromise on performance, memory, I/O capability, cost and management complexity and [use] proprietary technology."

Fowler said the new blade systems are the first based on open I/O, which is separate from the CPU, meaning either can be swapped at any time. The chassis supports up to 10 four-socket blades with dual-core Opteron processors. The same chassis will support blade servers based on Sun's Sparc processor platform by early next year, according to company officials.

The blades will consume 20 percent less power than comparable rack-mounted servers, while taking half the space. All components of the blades, including power supplies and I/O, can be managed from Sun's N1 System Manager software.