One Storage and Two Quadcore Blades from Sun

The new Disk Module is touted by Sun as the first open storage blade machine. The provider markets this series as individually configurable storage devices with open source, adaptable software. The Blade 6000 holds eight serial attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives ranging from 73 to 146 Gbytes capacity that store about 1.2 TBytes of data. The SAS controller protects RAID 0, 1 and 2 levels. The storage server runs on Solaris 10 and Windows 2003/2008, but also on 64-bit RHEL 4.6 and 5.1 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 as well as VMware 3.0.2 and 3.5.

The Blade X6240 Server supports up to 16 DIMM slots at 667 MHz with two- or four-Gbyte capacity. Up to two AMD Opteron Quadcore processors provide 512 Kbytes of L2 cache per CPU and yet another 2 MBytes of shared L3 cache. CPU energy consumption is a choice of 55W, 75W or 105W apiece. Two Base-T Ethernet ports bind to the external network and a 10/100 Base-T port to the management network. This Sun server offers a 32-bit RHEL 4.6 only. Like the Disk Module it also runs on 64-bit Solaris 10, Windows 2003/2008, 64-bit RHEL 5.1 and 64-bit SLES 9 and 10, along with the VMware ESX Server 3.5 alternative.

The Sun CP3250 Blade Server with Intel on board contains up to eight CPU cores with the Xeon LGA771 ATCA. A 12-Mbyte cache, an up to 24-Gbyte main memory consisting of six DIMM sockets, and a slot for type CF-2 Flash work together as memory.

The U.S. price list has the Blade 6000 module at around $1,600, the AMD Blade X6240 module at round $2,600 and the Intel CP3250 module at about $7,000. The webpages give contact information.