Feature Story

By Lisa DiCarlo

February 20, 2008 - Blade servers reached an important milestone in the third quarter of 2007 when, according to the IDC worldwide quarterly server tracker, they represented more than 10 percent of all servers shipped worldwide, and revenue from blade servers topped $1 billion for the first time in a single quarter. The lineup of blade servers from Sun Microsystems easily exemplifies why enterprise datacenters worldwide are adopting blades so quickly. Their high-density, compact modular format enables blade servers to simplify datacenter topology, ease resource management and help IT departments deliver services faster, more reliably and more flexibly than they can with rack-mounted or pedestal servers.

Blade servers have been around only since 2001, and Sun has taken a leading role in their phenomenal growth by introducing 17 new blade servers in less than two years, which has resulted in year-over-year growth of 400 percent in shipments of Sun blade servers. This growth is fueled by innovations, especially in Sun's open architecture. These modular blade systems are the industry's only open blade architecture; they support SPARC, AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors, as well as multiple operating systems including Solaris, Linux and Windows, which gives customers the ultimate in flexibility. Now Sun is expanding its portfolio of blade servers further with the new Sun Blade X8450 server module, the first four-socket capable Intel Xeon system in the Sun Blade 8000 family.

"More and more customers are discovering that blade servers offer a better way to make their datacenters more efficient and flexible," says Lisa Sieker, vice president of marketing for Sun's Systems Group. "Sun's momentum in the blade market is a testament to our innovative systems design, which leads to extremely high blade performance and efficiency."

Sun Blade systems have emerged as a way to maximize computing density and optimize application performance, scalability and reliability, while at the same time minimizing power, cooling and datacenter space requirements. Sun's year-over-year growth in blade shipments gives it the fastest growth of any company in sales of blades.

The Sun Blade 6000 Modular System enables users to run virtually any datacenter application while minimizing space and cooling requirements and delivering high service levels. The Sun Blade 8000 family is geared to support high-performance databases, enterprise business applications and other high-performance computing (HPC) environments.

As well as being the first four-socket-capable Intel Xeon system in the Sun Blade 8000 family, the Sun Blade X8450 server module also has the most headroom for expansion in its class, with 32 dual in-line memory module (DIMM) slots, which allows for an industry-leading two DIMMs per core. This flexibility enables customers to expand capacity easily as business needs dictate.

Solving Business Problems

The Sun Blade X8450 server module builds on Sun's expertise in blade server innovation, incorporating features such as industry-standard I/O, transparent management and a unique chassis-level approach to power and cooling that delivers power without sacrificing efficiency. Designed to run high-end enterprise applications as part of clusters and grid computing, Sun Blade 8000 systems offer up to three times the density of rack-mounted servers yet are up to 43 percent more efficient in their use of power. In addition, Sun's I/O modules are hot-pluggable and can be installed much faster than I/O modules in competing blades.

Innovations such as these are among the reasons why more than 300 enterprise customers are already running their businesses on Sun's blade platforms and why Sun has experienced growth of more than 50 percent in blade server shipments from quarter to quarter. Companies from nearly every sector — financial services, education, media, telecommunications, government, utilities and technology — are choosing Sun Blade Systems to make better use of their resources and gain competitive advantage.

"Sun Blade systems are uniquely designed to be open, flexible and efficient," says Michael McNerney, Director, Blade Server Product Line. "Using industry-standard components, providing transparent management and supporting multiple processor architectures and operating systems, Sun Blade systems ease overall data center management yet remain flexible to accommodate changing business needs. And the systems also integrate easily into existing datacenter environments."

Today, every company, regardless of its size, is under pressure to deliver new services and contain costs because of rapid growth in their native businesses and in Web-driven services. When companies add systems as they grow, it bolsters functionality but complicates the management of their datacenters. The expense and complexity of powering, cooling and managing datacenters make the enterprise IT infrastructure increasingly (and needlessly) problematic. That is, having too many servers in the datacenter increases both complexity and costs.

Stockcharts.com offers one clear example. The company uses Sun's blade platform to generate up to 5 million real-time stock charts a day for its 18,000 customers. The company's chart application is highly CPU-intensive, but installing a Sun Blade system delivered more horsepower while enabling the company to configure and maintain fewer computers than would have been possible with any other server approach.

The Advantages Sun Offers

This is the kind of performance enterprise customers demand. Most won't buy technology if it cannot demonstrate a positive impact on their business performance and efficiency. Sun has helped many companies, including Stockcharts.com, Navisite, Poste Italiane Group, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Gracenote, and the University of Wisconsin, achieve better business results through blade technology. These and other companies can take advantage of the following benefits:

• Increased performance: Sun Blade Systems hold 15 world records in benchmarks.
• Increased efficiency: Sun Blade high density utilizes datacenter space better than traditional server platforms, while its system design decreases power and cooling costs, overhead and complexity.
• Increased flexibility: Sun Blade systems run multiple processors and operating systems.
• Increased business agility: Sun blades are scalable, so customers save money by paying only for technology that meets immediate needs.
• Increased availability and reliability: Sun's is the only blade architecture in which all major components are hot-pluggable and easily swappable.

In sum, blade servers have advanced to the point where they can be used for mainstream applications that previously only rack-mounted servers could handle. Sun's blade product portfolio, which has experienced year-over-year growth of 400 percent, is continuing to expand with scalable, flexible, powerful systems that help customers run their businesses more efficiently.

Free Trial

See for yourself. Try a Sun Blade system free for 60 days, then buy it at a 25 percent discount. This no-obligation program allows you to put the system through its paces before committing to deployment. During the test phase, we encourage customers to visit a brand-new site, sun.com/bladescommunity, that we have built so they can exchange ideas and information with other users and get the latest blade product information and news from Sun.