Apparently Dell figured they could sneak up on companies like Sun who are closed today in the US to celebrate Martin Luther King day and decided this was the day they should release their new blade platform. The Register's Ashlee Vance had a
field day comparing Dell's new blade chassis to the nearly two year old HP c-class blade. I guess if you are two years behind the competition, you pick a quite day to introduce your new product. Maybe it is Dell's new found love for Solaris, but their web site seems to focus on comparing their new blade with an almost identical offering from HP and IBM's blade. Couldn't find a mention of the SunBlade 6000. Of course, Dell's new blade does have half the memory, half the CPUs, half the disks that the SunBlade 6000 can pack in the same 10 RU of space, but that is not all it's missing, it also comes up short with no RAID5/6, no SAS backplane and no storage blade. The claims of power savings over HP and IBM are certainly eco conscious, however few details on what configs were compared. I am sure IBM and HP will have a field day responding. Since AMD and Intel have both introduced a number of lower power processors in the last two years, it is easy to claim power savings if you use different CPUs. Of course just for fun, I went ahead and configured one of Dell's new blades on their web site, and received an estimated ship date of March 10.
Can't wait until March 10th to get your blade, don't despair, you can get a
SunBlade 6000 shipped to you in a few days. You don't even have to buy it. Use our try and buy program, and you can keep the system for 60 days, and return it at no charge if you don't decide to buy it. We even pay the return shipping. If you do buy the same exact system we sent you to try, Sun will even give you an extra 25% off. Versus fabricated eco power savings claims, encouraging our customers to buy their trial units versus shipping them the exact or similar config actually save energy, although the shipping companies aren't too happy with the program. Who knows, after 60 days, Dell may even be shipping their blades with a little shorter lead time. As long as you don't mind getting by with half the CPU, memory, and disks, the Dell blade doesn't seem too bad, and should give look-alike HP a run for their money. But do have your credit card ready if you call Dell, so far, Sun's try and buy program is one of the few things they haven't tried to copy.
When will the mentioned Sun Blade 6000 "Storage Blade" be available?
Posted by Thorleif Wiik on January 21, 2008 at 12:23 PM PST #
Sun doesn't pre-announce products, I was simply noting that Dell's blade chassis doesn't have a storage blade. If you need a storage blade, I would certainly encourage you to contact your Sun sales representative and discuss our near-term product roadmap.
Posted by Marc Hamilton on January 21, 2008 at 12:46 PM PST #
Posted by credit on January 21, 2008 at 12:48 PM PST #
Biggest issue I see for the other vendors is the lack of direct PCIe 10gig options for the blades. The M6220 switch has a 10-gig option, but each blade only gets a pair (or possibly quartet, if configurable that way) of 1-gig ports. I see this as a feather in the X6000 blades, and a significant factor in our decision to get one.
I want 10-gig per blade for our VMware ESX farm. At only ~$1600, the Sun option is pretty good money over a pricey switch with less bandwidth. The downside? Not on the ESX HCL yet...
Posted by Charles Soto on January 21, 2008 at 03:47 PM PST #
I don't think "shipped to you in a few days" is entirely accurate.
I waited 4 weeks to get my Blade booked by Sun. One part number issue after another. . .
It's finally booked but still no ship date.
Not even my Sun account manager can get details on when it will ship.
Posted by Waiting patiently on January 22, 2008 at 03:46 PM PST #
Sorry for the delays you encountered in booking your order and getting a ship date. If you send me your sales order number offline to marc@sun.com I will definitely look into it and get resolved.
Posted by Marc Hamilton on January 23, 2008 at 06:46 AM PST #
Paragraph one, sentence three: "quite day".
Clever.
Posted by mo on January 29, 2008 at 01:56 AM PST #