Sun's New Blade Looks to Carve Up the Enterprise

With the introduction of the Sun Blade 6000 Family of server hardware, Sun Microsystems is hoping to make it easier for IT administrators to provide the kind of flexibility that software developers need to build truly innovative and revolutionary products.

There are two groups that exist within the information technology department of any large enterprise:

• On one side, software developers have the responsibility of turning the ideas of the marketing and product development groups into a reality. To make this magic happen, they need the freedom to build solutions of the highest quality possible within the timelines mandated by the market.
• On the other side of the IT house, there are administrators who have the responsibility of building and maintaining the information technology infrastructure upon which the company is built.

In an ideal organization, IT administrators are proactively working with the developers to provide hardware solutions that most closely meet their needs. Yet while attempting to meet the needs of the developers, IT administrators must think about the overall health of the IT infrastructure along with the company's bottom line.

Close your eyes and imagine this: A 10RU (rack unit) modular system chassis containing ten brand new Sun 6000 Blade servers. You're probably thinking, That sounds great, but I'm not a Solaris shop.

No worries. Blade from Sun supports Windows, Linux, and the company's flagship OS Solaris running on single and multi-core processors by Sun, AMD, and Intel.

Moreover, Sun hasn't forgotten about the enterprises that have dived head-first in the virtualization ocean. Sun Blade 6000 also fully supports VMWare.

Close your eyes again and imagine all those configuration options within a single chassis with input/output (I/O) throughput as high as 128Gbps (gigabytes per second). The promised flexibility and performance is enough to raise the eyebrow of even the most seasoned IT infrastructure veteran.

How does the Sun 6000 Blade match up to the competition? According to the information on their website (grain of salt not included), the new Blade server provides up to double the memory and I/O capacity of competing rack-mounted servers while saving 15 percent more energy.

If Sun can deliver on the promises described here and on its website, it would make sense to at least give them a look before your next data center build-out or enterprise content management system implementation. Your software developers will thank you.

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