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In my opinion the blade systems from Sun were the most misunderstood products on the marketplace. Do you remember the B1600 blade system? 16 small blades on 3 Rack units. You were able to run large amounts of them in very small place. There were not fast, but they were designed to really enable the customer to densly pack servers, not playing this "thermal death gamble". Talk with customers of the 1st and 2nd generation blade systems. Some customer still use them and they would like to kill the sales rep of the descision to kill the B1600. The market at whole didn´t understood the product and bought products that fried themself in their cooking ... err ... blade centers.

The blade system dubbed Andromeda a.k.a. Sun Blade 8000 Modular Server System has a similar problem, but not at the extend as the B1600. They were designed with a certain idea: bringing enterprise into the blades. 4 sockets and the capablity to use PCIe gives you a whole lot opportunties to use blades in areas, your wasn´t able to do so before. It was a little bit tedious to explain the customers, why we say "No, our blades are not to big, the others are to small for real work". But the idea starts to get real traction.

But well, i have to admit, that our 8000-er blades are a sometimes little too big, in HPC or webserving for example. So ... today we announced the next blade system, the Sun Blade 6000, fullfilling the promise of the B1600 of a dense and multiarchitectural (Niagara, Opteron, Xeon) blade chassis with the technological advancements of the B8000 like PCIe as the chassis wide interconnect between system components. Some