Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Sun's New Modular Blade Servers

I'm so excited about today's launch. You can view the full launch online. The energy level at today's event in Washington D.C. couldn't be higher. Despite being three time zones ahead, I woke up before six a.m. and walked the mile and a half to the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center where we are holding the launch. For over two years I've worked with some of our largest customers in HPC and Web, with Andy Bechtolsheim and his design teams, and with the OpenSolaris community to get here. So here are some real-time notes from the amphitheater at the Ronald Reagan building.

Jonathan opened up the day talking about red shift, open source, and the types of customers we are designing our new modular computing products around. Some customers see IT as a cost. To them, our new modular blade computing platform is a great way to reduce costs. But the much more interesting customers are those that see IT as a competitive weapon. The latter value the $2B a year in innovation we are putting into our systems, into OpenSolaris, and into the rest of our software products. David Hadsell, VP of Government Solutions for EDS then joined Jonathan on stage talking about how EDS and Sun are working together with government and large commercial customers. Then Jonathan put up a Google map showing dots everywhere someone had downloaded OpenSolaris. Then a new one for me, he showed the same slide without the map overlap. Amazingingly, you could still clearly differentiate the major continents, regions, and countries around the world. With over 8 million points you can draw a pretty good world map. Jonathan noted that Apple is planning to use the ZFS file system from OpenSolaris in future versions of their OS. So how does that help Sun? It is pretty simple, now every Apple developer will know ZFS and how to use it on products like our SunFire x4500 storage server and other Sun products.

John Fowler was up next, talking about the highlight of our launch, the new Sun Blade 6000 Modular System and how Sun is applying its systems level innovation into the blade market. The first open and versatile enterprise blade platform. So the Sun Blade 6000 isn't just great for HPC and internet infrastructure, it can be used for all your enterprise business applications. Then Andy Bechtolsheim came up on stage to talk about the value of design and what he focused on in the Sun Blade 6000 design. Simplicity is one of the hallmarks of the Sun Blade 6000 design. It is an open platform, supporting UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara), Intel, and AMD blades.

Andy is now having John Fowler pull out one blade at a time. But what is in the tall rack next to the Sun Blade 6000 and covered by a black curtain? More to come ...

Pat Gelsinger, General Manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group then came up to talk about how Intel is working with Sun, supporting Solaris as their enterprise class OS (Intel is an OEM licensee of Solaris). Pat and John talked about having how they are working on at least 10 different Sun/Intel products. Next Mario Rivas, Executive VP of AMD Computing Products Group, came up and talked about how Sun and AMD have been working together for over 4 years and how AMD's HyperTransport technology and AMD's quad core Barcelona technology due out later this year are designed into the Sun Blade 6000.

Finally, Andy came back up to talk about the next steps in our blade architecture. So the big surprise of the day was the unveiling of a future product that supports all the same blades as those in the Sun Blade 6000 introduced today. Andy and John then pulled off the black curtain and showed off a new "unibody design" rack which in Q4 will support 48 blades and 786 cores in one rack and is the building block for our TACC supercomputer.

Posted at 07:47AM Jun 06, 2007 by marchamilton in General  |  Comments[22]