* Sun rolls out Sun Blade X8420
Sun last week announced a blade server that the company claims is faster than other blade and rack-mount servers on the market.
The Sun Blade X8420 Server Module uses the 4-socket dual core 2.8 GHz AMD Opteron 8000 series processors and delivers what Sun claims is 16 times the throughput of competing 4-socket blade servers.
The X8420 Server Module ran the SPEC OMP2001 benchmark suite and surpassed IBM’s System p5 550 and HP’s ProLiant DL585 by scores of 16% and 29%. It also posted x86 records on floating point and integer-intensive SPEC2006 benchmarks. Results can be seen here.
The blade server has PCIe Express Modules which support Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand technologies, allowing customers to mix applications that require different I/O configurations in the same chassis.
The new blade is designed to run resource and transaction- intensive business and technical applications.
Sun is also offering a subscription service for its Sun Blade modular system that allows a customer to refresh their server modules three times over a 42-month period. Customers will be upgraded to the latest blade architecture when it becomes available. Sun will also deliver, install the new modules and pick up the old server modules.
The Sun Blade X8420 Server Module starts at $13,095 per server module.
