Tuesday July 11, 2006

"Andromeda" Blade Server - Congratulations

Congratulations to the team

Sun today announced the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System (code-named "Andromeda"). As the System Integration Lead for this platform, I want to take this opportunity to congratulate the entire engineering team (hardware team, software teams - including OS, BIOS, ILOM, and system diagnostics teams, SQA team, documentation team, services team, etc.) on a job well done. Customers are already very excited about this product.

The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System and its first server module, the Sun Blade x8400, are an impressive accomplishment for our team here on the East Coast.^[1] You can read all about it here, here, here, etc... and you might have even caught the webcast of the announcement. What might not have been quite as obvious is that this modular system has a pretty robust and exciting roadmap of "pluggables" coming down the line as well.

Rock-solid foundation by design

By virtue of Andromeda's 'no compromises' design, we've got a rock-solid foundation in place for the dozens of new, innovative modules getting ready to roll. Can't say much, obviously, but you can use a little imagination. We've got multiple generations of compute module upgrades already in the pipeline, and we'll be further extending our I/O module offerings - both in the NEM form-factor and in the industry-standard PCIe ExpressModule form factor. (And we might even have a few other ideas in our bag-of-tricks that'll surprise more than a few folks about what we can do with this design.)

"If you can touch it, you can hot-plug it."

It's our support for the industry-standard PCIe ExpressModules form factor, though, that made me put this entry in my "PCI Express" category. This is because it's the Sun Blade 8000's service model, its complete 'hot-pluggability', that's the real winner for a modular computing system like ours. If you can touch it on our system, you can hot-plug it. This means fans, power supplies, disk drives... the typical stuff. But it also means the redundant chassis monitoring modules (CMMs) and, most importantly, the I/O modules - the NEMs and the EMs.^[2]

And... read the FUD with a critical eye

Anyway, you'll likely hear a lot of noise from our competitors in the next few days and weeks. They'll tend to confuse the issues, of course, but I suppose that's their job.

They'll comment on how unsuccessful Sun's first blade server (the Sun Fire B1600)... the implication being that Sun doesn't know how to do this right. They're wrong, of course. On the contrary, our team - although an entirely different team than the original B1600 team - fully deconstructed all these issues, and many others that our competitors had or still have, and took it all back to the drawing board.

But then they'll tell you it's "too big". Well, tell them we can fit two (2) of our systems in a standard rack (total of 160 cores in 38 rack units) and power and cool them using today's data center standards. Then ask them about theirs... can they match the compute/memory/IO density and be able to cool and power it? Not without some compromises.

And maybe they'll tell you "Sun doesn't do Windows". Well, hmm, don't tell my buddies on the Windows team. And pay no attention to the fact that we're WHQL certified (with more certifications on the way) and listed in the Microsoft Windows Server Catalog.

Or perhaps they'll try to tell you "Sun's missing out on Linux". Well, again, I think my colleagues on our Linux team would beg to differ. We've got Red Hat and SLES certifications too. And, of course, this is an x86 system, so should it really surprise anyone that we support all these OSes?^[3]

Congratulations!

Anyway, this is a really exciting time for me and the team. Congrats again to everyone involved in this milestone. Let's keep it rolling!

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[1]Despite the fact that this morning's product announcement took place in sunny San Francisco, the team responsible for the engineering design, SQA, and delivery of this system is our team here in wet, rainy Burlington, MA.

[2]The PCI Express I/O hot-plug on Andromeda is one of the aspects of the system of which I'm personally most proud. The fact that we were able to implement an entirely OS-neutral ACPI hot-plug implementation is still a source of personal pride. Actually, maybe I'll blog about this in more detail in the future.

[3]We just happen to offer one of those OSes free-of-charge: Solaris.

(2006-07-11 20:50:00.0) Permalink Comments [4]