The Sun Blade Blog
X8450 And The Four Socket Blade World
We're launching the Sun Blade X8450.
I looked at the four socket blade landscape. Sun and HP are the only vendors offering four socket blades using Intel. We are differentiating ourselves from HP by offering a superior, four socket optimized chassis. The Sun Blade 8000 chassis (with X8450s or X8440s) has screaming fast I/O and slick ILOM 2.0 management. IBM does not want to touch this market and Dell is nowhere close.
Also, the X8450 is not a stripped down, four socket server. It has a complete board layout, with all the circuitry and components that you'd find in a Sun rackmount. Unlike IBM, it won't reduce the number of blades you can place in the chassis.
We've been growing our four socket blade business pretty fast. How? Customers value our integration of chassis and blade. They're running databases, ERPs, HPC applications and customers need a tight package with a strong ecosystem that includes storage (X4500) and services.
NOTE: I didn't use this post to write about the 32DIMM slots, or the 4 Quad-Core Xeons or the super fast 160Gbps I/O throughput. I'll let the X8450 web page do that.
Posted at 08:28AM Feb 20, 2008 by Amit Raman in Sun | Comments[8]
Here's a problem; we were all set to get a chassis and a couple of blades on Try and Buy with a view to buying a shedload of them, but the test kit doesn't come with any networking it seems. Could you confirm that at all please?
Posted by Ceri Davies on February 20, 2008 at 12:00 PM PST #
Hello Ceri,
Thank you for your interest in Sun Blade Modular Systems!
The T&B configurations actually do include a GbE networking component. This component is called a Network Express Module (NEM). The NEM that is included in the T&B configurations is a 10 port Gigabit Ethernet passthru NEM. It provides 1 GbE passthru port to each of the installed Server Modules (blades).
Each configuration offered includes the following components.
Qty 1 - Sun Blade 6000 Chassis
Qty 1 - 10 Port GbE Passthru Network Express Module
Qty 4 - 73GB, 10K RPM SAS Hard drives
Qty 2 - Sun Blade Server Modules (either SPARC, Xeon or Opteron based)
The three different configurations offered are based on specific cpu technology. You can select a configuration that contains 2 SPARC Server Modules or 2 Xeon Server Modules or 2 Opteron Server Modules.
Additional I/O modules (e.g., Fibre Channel, InfiniBand etc.) can be requested.
Please don't hesitate to let me know if you have any additional questions.
Hope this helps,
Marc Shelley
Posted by Marc Shelley on February 20, 2008 at 01:28 PM PST #
Thank you Marc, I've been very ill informed in that case. Will be ordering one as soon as I confirm our roadies have somewhere to rack it!
Posted by Ceri Davies on February 21, 2008 at 02:26 AM PST #
I have a question about the blade 6000 chassis.
What is the probability that a chassis breaks and takes all the servers down?
I know the chassis is a passive component, but it is still a single point of failure.
We are interested in blades, because of the better managability, but separate rack servers are cheaper and don't have the risk of shared components failing.
What's your point of view?
Thanks
Mika
Posted by Mika on February 26, 2008 at 07:17 AM PST #
The chances of the chassis failing are low.
Which rack servers are you comparing?
Posted by Amit Raman on March 03, 2008 at 10:22 PM PST #
Hi Amit
We're comparing the blade chassis to comparable Sun rack servers.
We like the blade form factor, but are "affraid" as the chassis is the single point of failure.
Are there any numbers that compare the availability of rack servers to blade servers?
Thanks
Posted by Mika on March 04, 2008 at 05:50 AM PST #
Mika,
A few responses:
- The chassis is fully passive, so the chances for failure are extremely low. This *possible* scenario affects all the blade vendors.
- Do you have a rep. that you're working with? We can provide MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) through the rep, if need be.
Thanks.
Posted by Amit Raman on March 05, 2008 at 08:54 AM PST #
Amit.
I hope you are ok, if you receive my email I really appreciate your answer.
I am student from University of Galileo on Guatemala C.A., the reason for
these email is because i have a university project and I have to design a
Hosting Project using SUN Microsystems products.
Can you help me design these project?
Regards.
Oscar Pedroza
Posted by Oscar Pedroza on August 07, 2009 at 02:31 PM PDT #