Sun Microsystems has unveiled the Sun Blade 8000 modular system.
The company believes it is the only modular system designed specifically for high-end x86 computing that delivers the performance, price and flexibility of top-of-the-line rack mount servers together with the serviceability and efficiency of blade servers.
Sun claims that its Blade 8000 modular system provides up to twice the system longevity and I/O throughput but uses 25% less space and 40% less power than comparable blade servers when compared with leading rack mount servers.
Furthermore, the company claims that the Blade 8000 system's focus on high-end x86 computing makes it an ideal datacentre compute engine for server consolidation and virtualisation, business applications, large-scale HPC deployments and high-requirement databases running on its Solaris 10 operating system.
In addition, the Sun Blade 8000 modular system supports industry-standard, hot-pluggable blade I/O adapters based on the PCI SIG ExpressModule standard. Suppliers such as Emulex, LSI Logic, Mellanox and QLogic have released or are committed to releasing industry-standard PCI Express ExpressModule adapters.
