Fujitsu to ship super-blade

Fujitsu this week is expected to announce the most powerful blade server ever.

The Primergy BX630 is an 8-socket blade that uses AMD’s Opteron processors. Each processor is interconnected using the HyperTransport protocol.

This blade is the first 8-socket dual core blade. It can scale from two to eight processors and because it uses dual-core technology, it has a lower power consumption than eight independent processors. The blade is designed for scaling data centers. It supports network edge devices and back-end databases.

The Primergy blade can be installed in present Primergy BX600 chassis or mixed with existing Intel Xeon-based Primergy BX620 S2 blade servers and Primergy BX630 2-socket blade servers, allowing customers to upgrade as needed.

The HyperTransport interconnect makes it possible to link two Primergy BX630 2-socket blades into a single 4-socket blade, and then link two of these 4-socket blade into a single Primergy BX630 8-socket blade for a 16-core blade.

The BX630 is the first 16 CPU blade. HP has a four-processor dual-core BL45P, which uses the AMD Opteron 800 series processor and starts at $13,147. IBM has the BladeCenter LS20, which also uses the Opteron processor, but tops out at a single dual-core processor.

The Primergy BX630 server blades also have from 16G- to 32G-bytes of main memory, two Gigabit Ethernet connections and a dual-channel Serial ATA controller for connection to two hot-pluggable Serial ATA hard disks. Optionally, the blade can have a PCI slot and a dual Fibre Channel module.

The Primergy blade is managed with Fujitsu’s ServerStart, ServerView and RemoteView management and monitoring software.

The Primergy BX630 8-socket server is expected to be available this quarter starting below $2,250 for a 2-socket configuration. An 8-socket Primergy BX630 blade is priced below $36,000.