Q&A with Sun: Sun preaches blade servers

The server market has traditionally focused on bigger and faster machines, the Big Iron that runs large corporate networks and databases. But a number of companies, including  Sun, are changing the way applications are deployed by networking many small, thin computers known as blade servers and by pooling their processing power.

Led by upstarts such as RLX Technologies, some of the large system vendors have jumped on this innovation within the server market. Sun's Subodh Bapat, CTO for Sun's volume systems products division, recently sat down with the IDG News Service to discuss his company's recent blade server announcements, and its vision for the next generation of the technology.

What is Sun's approach to the blade server market?

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The server market has traditionally focused on bigger and faster machines, the Big Iron that runs large corporate networks and databases. But a number of companies, including  Sun, are changing the way applications are deployed by networking many small, thin computers known as blade servers and by pooling their processing power.

Led by upstarts such as RLX Technologies, some of the large system vendors have jumped on this innovation within the server market. Sun's Subodh Bapat, CTO for Sun's volume systems products division, recently sat down with the IDG News Service to discuss his company's recent blade server announcements, and its vision for the next generation of the technology.

What is Sun's approach to the blade server market?

If you track the history of computing systems, you'll notice that once a decade or so, there is a major shift in the architecture paradigm in the way computer systems are built. We think there is a major new one on the horizon, and that has to do with throughput computing and horizontal scaling.

If you just look at where we've come in the past 10 years, we have come to an era where everybody takes a Web browser for granted, everybody does Web-based transactions, e-commerce is a reality, and applications servers that connect e-commerce front end with credit card databases and transaction databases and inventory database are now an accepted fact of life.

Over time, as more and more enterprises start deploying Web services to gain more efficiency in their business processes and more consumers start doing Web-based transactions, we think the name of the game is going to shift away from vertical scaling to what we call horizontal scaling.

Can you give us an update regarding the blade products that you just recently introduced with the N1 announcements?

We announced a variety of different blades. We're one of the first vendors in the industry to offer a mix-and-match approach with multiple different kinds of blades that all go into the same chassis. We have our SPARC Solaris blades, we have our x86 blades that can run Linux or that can run Solaris x86. We also believe in integrating some of the networking value very close to this dense configuration of servers that you get in a blade chassis.

We announced a load balancing blade, which again is a standard blade. It comes in the same form factor as any of our server blades and fits into the same slot in the chassis as any of our blades. The same thing goes with the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) specialty blade that we introduced. As you know, security is an important consideration for anybody deploying large systems anywhere. We've integrated the SSL accelerator into the blade chassis, thereby making security an integral part of the blade platform.

Are you planning to release a new line of Intel-based blade servers in the coming quarter?

Yes, we are looking at the next generation of our LX50 line.

Do you plan to stick with the Pentium III processor for that or do you plan to upgrade to some of the newer processors that Intel has brought out, namely the Pentium M, which has some interesting power characteristics?

We have a group here that is very active in tracking Intel's road map. We're on top of Intel's road map, and we're on top of AMD's road map. We have excellent relationships with both Intel and AMD. Intel's chip group considers Sun's systems group an important customer because we're one of the few three or four major systems vendors in the industry that is now committed to the Intel line.

I can't comment on the specifics of which specific processor we will use, we will make that announcement at the launch. We have locked down on our decision as to which one we will use, it will be very competitive when it does come out, it will be very aggressively priced, and it will be very performance competitive and price performance competitive.

Intel is vying actively as is AMD for our x86 business. The fact that Solaris scales better on large scale x86 systems than Linux does or Windows does, is something that is attractive to these x86 chip vendors as they try and go up the food chain and truly make x86 a platform to penetrate deeper in the enterprise. Linux and Windows, while they're trying to get there, they're not there with Solaris-caliber reliability, availability, and scalability just yet.

What is the most important buying consideration for an IT manager considering a blade system?

Budgets are flat, at best. So everybody in an IT department is looking to squeeze as much utilization out of their existing deployments as they can. One of the things they're looking to do is buy a blade server that runs the application I need at the time I most need that application, but that can also be dynamically on the fly reconfigured to run something else when I no longer have the workload that I used to have on my first application.

(They want) this ability to take a densely packaged set of server blades and create virtual domains or virtual boundaries within the server chassis, and segment it up using various virtualization technologies.

Is that how you are positioning your first generation products, or is that what you have in mind for the second generation?

We have this ability in our first-generation blade product, because our first-generation blade product ships with a version of our N1 software as an option. It will allow the retargeting and repurposing of individual blades for different applications. We see this as key to our horizontal scaling and throughput computing message going forward, because this change in paradigm would not be successful without the right virtualization, provisioning and policy management mechanism in the systems management area. Our vision of N1 is extending this not just to the blade level, but also the rack level, and the entire data center level.

When are your second-generation blade products due?

The second-generation blade products are not due until late next year, late 2004. We're doing a lot of new innovation in those blades. For example, we are architecting them to run bigger applications with more memory and more compute capacity than our first-generation blade products. Our first-generation blade products are really targeted for deployment or as replacements for 1U rack servers.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.