c0t0d0s0.org

Sun announced a number of new blades for the Blade 6000 chassis yesterday. From my perspective two of them were especially interesting. The first one is the Sun Blade 6000 disk module. It´s an 8-slot disk module based on SAS (you will find in-depth informations in the Sun Blade™ 6000 Disk Module Configuration Guide manual).

The other important was the Sun Blade T6340 server module. This blade is equiped with two UltraSPARC T2+ procs. Thus you have 128 threads in one blade in a system and up to 256 GB of memory. When you look at the blade, you will recognize that a large part of the circuit board is occupied by memory slots. At the moment this is the blade with the biggest memory capacity in the industry.

In addition to this both blades we´ve announced a dual-proc Opteron based blade with the X6240 for the Blade Server 6000 chassis. The Blade Sun Netra CP3250 ATCA. This isn´t a standard blade for the 6000 or 8000 blade chassis. It´s a Xeon server blade for usage in telco blade servers.

The Register reports about announcement of quad and dual socket Intel Blades for our Modular Server chassis.

The four-socket blade server will fit into Sun's existing Blade 8000 chassis and should ship in the second half of this year. The system will be based on the four-core "Tigerton" version of Xeon from Intel and will support up to 128GB of memory.

I would prefer the Opteron Blades (an surely when Barcelona is out) out of several reasons like nested pages, better overall architecture and stuff like that, but your milage with your respective workload may vary. It´s certainly a good thing that we offer the Intel Blades for such workloads.

After updating all the other systems, the 4 proc blades for the Sun Fire 8000 Modular Server were refreshed with Socket F as Sun Blade X8420 Blade Server Module.

Interesting customer story about the usage of T2000 and X4100 at ebay inc. It´s one of this marketing speak news, nevertheless it points to real world usages of T2000 and databases.

PS: Guiseppe already pointed to it in a comment a few days ago but i didn´t want to hide it in the comments any longer

Gavin wrote an excellent summary on the fault management architecture on Opteron Rev. F systems.

So ein bisschen untergegangen im Trubel um Blackbox ist die Auffrischung der Galaxy-Baureihe.Gestern wurden die entsprechenden Systeme angekündigt. Damit können jetzt die Server DDR2 verwenden, da nun Sockel-F-Prozessoren in diesen Systemen verbaut werden.

EBS starts to ship IBM-Servers with Solaris x86. But the most interesting quote is:

"A lot of people are listening," EBS CEO Fran Oh told us. "Customers who migrated from Solaris to Linux have often found themselves to be unhappy. They didn't have a choice before to correct the problem and now they do."

So, several announcements today: UltraSPARC 4+ is at 1.8 Ghz now, we have two new Opteron new beneath the Galaxy-Class servers: X2200M2 with two sockets and the X2100M2 with one socket. Additionally there is a new workstation: The Sun Ultra 20 M2.

Additional there is an interesting subscription model for the Sun Blade 8000 Series called Sun Refresh Service. Subscribe to it to get a coninually refresh of the systems.

Enterprise Networking reports about our new server offerings and headlines: Trio of Servers Put Sun "Ahead of the Curve."

"None of these products are commodity offerings, they're top-of-class offerings. Sun is ahead of the curve," Jonathan Eunice, analyst with Illuminata, told internetnews.com.

The blade system is absolutely different from what HP and IBM are doing; this is a full bore data center play without any compromise.

news.com reported on 10th of july about the then upcoming x86 launch:

"Each one of them has flash," Eunice said. "In each one of the segments they targeted, they did something that is either unique or head-of-class to make it clear they're not just doing a me-too, yeah, yeah."

news.com posted an article about our new blade serversSun defends big blade server: 'Size matters'.
I tend to view the world like Andy:

"It's not that our blade is too large. It's that the others are too small," he said.

In the case you want expand the usage of blades for bigger workloads you need more processors or cores and you need for I/O. Both requirements leads to more electronics in you blade. With small blades you see two problems:

• Missing space. There is a paradoxon: The more you fill your blade with electronics, the more free space do you need to cool it down (fhere have to be some space for the air flow)
• Slots. The amount of I/O-Slots in a blade is a very precious resource. You can only build a certain amount of slots in a given amout of space. Basic Physics.

Internet News published an article about our new x86-Products:

"Bechtolsheim and his team have shown engineering talent that's not to be underestimated," said Brookwood. "He's demonstrated the kind of vision you don't see at other companies."

Robin seems to like the X4500, but he definitely don´t like our Storage Group:

Don’t Let Sun’s Storage Group Get Their Hands On It!
Or it will be doomed for sure. Keep it in the server group, where there is at least a chance that customers will be able to discover the virtues of this box on their own.

Rumours about the launch this evening at the Register.

The Register speculates about the product annoucements next week. Nice article with some nice quotes:

Sun has now tossed out a few "iPod moments," as it likes to call them. You have the UltraSPARC T1-based servers, an eight-socket Opteron box and the x4500 system. All of these systems are very unique compared to what other Tier 1s are offering, and unique has served Sun well in the past.

and

We know that Sun insiders are tired of being beaten up in the press. They're tired of being counted out as DEC junior.

Yes, i´m tired of it. For sure.