Breaking: Sun announces new blade servers

Today is a big day for fans of Sun hardware: the company is getting aggressive in the blade server space, announcing a new blade chassis and three different blade options. The new architecture, called the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System, will include the following blade configurations:

• The Sun Blade X6250, a two-socket blade that uses an Intel quad-core Xeon processor.
• The Sun Blade T6300, a one-socket system that uses the UltraSPARC T1 processor (a.k.a "Niagara").
• The Sun Blade X6220, a two-socket blade that uses dual-core AMD Opteron processors.

In case you hadn't noticed, the X6250 will be the first Sun machine to use an Intel chip since the company dropped Intel in 2005. The new systems will support Sun's Solaris 10, Microsoft Windows, Linux and VMware's virtualization hypervisor software. In addition to the new blade servers, Sun is announcing a 10U (17.5-inch) chassis that will allow customers to mix and match up to 10 of the new blades to suit their specific needs. When fully loaded, the chassis will support up to 320 processing cores, 2.5TB of data and 5TB/s of I/O throughput per rack.

Clearly, the company understands that in order to compete in the blade server space, it will need to give customers a wide range of choices, to suit different business environments. "What we are offering is the broadest set of support for applications in the same physical form factor," said Mike McNerney, director of Sun's blade product line. "These systems really offer the best performance on blade architecture that is out there." Even AMD got in on the cross-platform love; "We applaud Sun's decision to deliver vendor choice to its customers in ever-expanding open environments and look forward to continually working with them to provide customers with technology that drives competitive differentiation in the global marketplace," said Randy Allen, Corporate Vice President of the Server Products Division at AMD. Stay tuned for more on this announcement tomorrow.

For more on the new servers and chassis:
- see this product page
- see this eWeek article