A fully configured Sun Blade 8000 system
Sun Fire X4500
Sun Fire X4600
48 hard drives in the X4500
Sun crams eight 3.0GHz Opteron cores in a single server
Later today Sun will announce three new systems utilizing AMD Opteron processors for enterprise level consolidation and storage applications. The new systems are all based on DDR1-ready dual-core Opteron processors. In total, Sun is launching one new blade system and two new 4U rackmount systems.
Sun's new Blade 8000 system is a large rackable blade server that Sun calls a modular blade system and one that Sun says it is the only one to be producing of this type. DailyTech had the chance to talk to David Lawler, Sun's director of
product definition and strategy for the Systems Group, about the new
servers. According to Lawler, the Sun Blade 8000's actual blades are separated from its network I/O module. Having the actual blade unit separate from the network I/O unit helps keep the system running in an event of a failure in a blade or a network module. With other blade systems having the network I/O components built in, the blade must be shut down for replacement. The Sun Blade 8000 uses PCI Express backplanes to connect the blades to the I/O modules. Using this design, customers will be able to mix and match different I/O modules to blades. This is something that Lawler says other manufacturers can't do.
Based on four dual-core Opteron 800s, the Sun Blade 8000 can operate up to 2.6GHz per core for a total of eight cores. The system also support up to 64GB of ECC registered DDR memory. With roughly 160Gbps of bandwidth per blade, a full configured Sun Blade 8000 system is able to produce out 1.6Tbps of I/O. Sun says that it's placed the Sun Blade 8000 system in roughly the same category as typical 4-blade servers.
Sun is also introducing two new systems called the Sun Fire X4600 and X4500. Although in the same family series, the two are very much different in design. The X4500 is focused on providing a large level of storage capacity without sacrificing on performance. Dedicated for large data-focused applications, the X4500 is a two-CPU system capable of accepting dual-core Opteron 285 series processors and up to 48 hot-swappable Serial ATA 2 hard drives. The system can be configured to hold up to 24TB (48 drives) of storage utilizing 7,200-RPM 500GB drives. Sun says the X4500 provides the highest level of data density available in a 4 RU chassis.
The Sun Fire X4600 has significantly less storage capacity than the X4500, but it has greater processing power. Able to accept up to eight processors, the Sun Fire X4600 can be equipped with eight Opteron 856 (3.0GHz) or eight Opteron 890 (2.8GHz dual-core) processors for a true 16-core system. The system is a dense 4U rack that accepts up to four hot-swappable 10K RPM SAS drives with hardware RAID 0 or 1 -- the X4500 only supports software RAID.
Currently the Sun Fire X4600 can be configured with up to 64GB of RAM but Sun says that by fall of this year, the system can be upgraded to 128GB of RAM. Lawler says that Sun's X4600 is priced to compete with 4-socket systems from other manufacturers.
Interestingly enough, AMD is poised to announce its next-generation server processor technology in just a few weeks.
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