Sun Unveils its First Storage Blade

Sun Microsystems, Inc. expanded its systems portfolio with the addition of a new storage blade and two new server modules targeted at improving efficiency in the enterprise.

The Sun Blade 6000 disk module, Sun’s first Open Storage blade, offers up to 1.2 TB of storage capacity and coupled with Solaris ZFS is a flash-ready platform targeted to change the economics of the enterprise datacenter. The new UltraSPARC T2 Plus-based Sun Blade T6340 server module features built-in, no cost virtualization technologies via Solaris Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms), making it an ideal platform for consolidating and virtualizing web scale applications, large scale databases, ERP and CRM. The Sun Blade X6240 server module, based on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, excels on high performance computing (HPC), consolidation and virtualization workloads with industry leading memory and I/O capacity. Sun also announced the Sun Netra CP3250 ATCA blade server, a new Intel Xeon blade server built for the telco market. All enterprise systems announced are available for a free 60-day trial via Sun’s Try and Buy Program.

With this announcement, Sun is expanding its blades portfolio to provide customers with new options. Sun’s blades portfolio has delivered four consecutive quarters of triple digit or better revenue growth year-over-year and seven consecutive quarters of quarter-over-quarter unit shipment growth, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, August 2008. The outstanding value and performance of Sun’s blade portfolio is recognized by a breadth of enterprise customers who have integrated the Sun Blade products into their infrastructures, across industries including government, energy and utilities, education, media, telecommunications, and Web 2.0. New Sun Blade customers include Citco Technology Management, DLR Case, Western Governors University, Last.fm, and SAP University Competence Center.

"Customers today want performance, efficiency and choice and clearly Sun is delivering. We’ve nearly tripled our blade server marketshare year-over-year," said Lisa Sieker, vice president, Systems Marketing, Sun Microsystems. "Sun’s blades portfolio offers datacenter efficiency at every level and provides the building blocks, x64 and SPARC(R), for infrastructure that costs less from the start and is easy to grow over the years. And now, with the addition of our first storage blade, we’re bringing the Open Storage revolution to the blades market."

New Open Storage Blade Simplifies Storage Deployment and Management
The new Sun Blade 6000 disk module provides a fast and easy way to add additional local storage capacity on the fly, offering customers unsurpassed storage scalability in an existing chassis, instantly providing storage capacity to be used by new applications. As a flash-ready platform, the new disk module is expected to provide even greater application performance in the future by further eliminating storage bottlenecks. Taking advantage of the integrated Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) infrastructure built into Sun Blade Modular Systems, the Sun Blade 6000 disk module is a cost effective and high performance direct-attach storage solution for running Web 2.0 and small database applications on the Sun Blade 6000 system. With JBOD technology in a blade form factor, the Sun Blade 6000 disk module offers two times more SAS storage capacity per server blade than IBM and one-third more than HP.

Enhanced Enterprise Blade Portfolio Delivers World Record Performance, Scalability and Flexibility
The Sun Blade T6340 server module, powered by two chip multi-threaded (CMT) UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, leverages Sun’s CMT architecture to deliver massive scalability, compute density and energy efficiency in a blade form factor. With up to 768 cores in a standard Sun Blade 6000 or 6048 chassis, the Sun Blade T6340 is fully optimized for highly distributed applications like MySQL, and other multi-tier enterprise applications. With no-cost virtualization capabilities built in via Logical Domains (LDoms) and Solaris Containers, the new Sun Blade T6340 is also an ideal consolidation and virtualization platform for large scale databases, ERP and CRM. Customers can consolidate hundreds of applications on a Sun Blade T6340 to better utilize server capacity while greatly reducing energy, space and cooling requirements.

Sun’s highly scalable, energy and space efficient CMT servers have set the bar for multi-core/multi-threaded performance with more than 60 world records posted to date. The Sun Blade T6340 server module adds to the tally with four new world records on key enterprise and HPC benchmarks:

• SPECjbb2005 – The Sun Blade T6340 server module excels in the dual- processor category under this Java(TM)-based Enterprise benchmark by pairing the most stable Java implementation on the market with the industry’s only multi-socket CMT blade platform. Results show that the Sun Blade T6340 server module beats other blade servers from IBM, HP and Dell by over 23 percent and surpasses the best Power6-based two-processor system by 89 percent, making it one of the highest performing and most efficient platforms in the industry for deploying Enterprise Java applications.
• SPECompM2001 – The new Sun Blade T6340 server module has achieved world record results for all dual-processor systems on the industry standard SPECompM2001 benchmark beating IBM Power6-based JS22 blade by 32 percent.
• SPECint_rate2006, SPECfp_rate2006 – The Sun Blade T6340 server module set world records for all dual-processor systems on compute-intensive SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 benchmarks surpassing the best two-CPU IBM Power 570 result by 31 percent on the integer intensive throughput test and showing up to 1.2 times advantage on the floating point throughput test against the two- socket Itanium-based HP rx2660 server. These compute-intensive tests were conducted on the Sun Blade 6000 disk module, further enhancing the local storage performance. Results show the Sun Blade T6340 server module provides a portable, scalable platform for developing and deploying parallel applications and for running compute-intensive workloads, particularly when coupled with the Solaris(TM) 10 Operating System (OS) and Sun Studio 12 software.

The Sun Blade X6240 server module offers industry-leading memory and I/O capacity, making it an excellent option for high performance computing (HPC), as well as for virtualization and consolidation. Capable of running a broad range of IT applications, the Sun Blade X6240 server module leverages AMD’s latest quad-core Opteron processors to efficiently execute floating point intensive workloads and enterprise benchmarks, like SPECjbb2005, where the Sun Blade X6240 posted the best result among all two-processor AMD Opteron-equipped systems, demanding the highest memory performance(5). With up to two times the memory of competing blades and industry leading I/O (up to 142 Gb/s), customers can consolidate numerous legacy systems onto Sun Blade X6240 server modules, benefitting from the additional power and cooling savings provided by the shared infrastructure of the blade server platform.

Sun Drives New Levels of Datacenter Efficiency For Telco Service Providers
The Sun Netra CP3250 ATCA blade server is Sun’s first eight-core, dual-socket Intel Xeon processor blade server and is Sun’s highest performing x64 carrier-grade blade server, optimized to run the most demanding, processor-intensive telecommunications applications with 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) support and up to 24GB of memory. The Netra CP3250 blade server is designed for rugged, heavy workload environments while maintaining outstanding performance and energy efficiency. The Netra CP3250 blade server nearly doubles the computing resources of dual-core Intel architecture-based ATCA blades in use today, without power and cooling increases and provides investment protection for existing 32-bit applications. With THIS announcement, Sun is expanding the industry’s largest carrier-grade server portfolio and offering telco and communications customers new options based on the quad-core Intel Xeon L5408 processor.

Services, Availability and Pricing
Sun offers a range of services to help customer maximize their blade infrastructure investments, from migration services to eco to virtualization. All products announced here are available now. The Sun Blade 6000 disk module starts at $1,595 (US List). The Sun Blade T6340 server module starts at $14,955 (US List). The Sun Blade X6240 server module starts at $2,610 (US List) and the Sun Netra CP3250 blade server starts at $6,995 (US List).