Sun blade specs emerge

Speeds n' feeds

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Hardware, 21st January 2003 20:35 GMT

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Exclusive If your sweepstake money was on LinuxWorld for the date when Sun would unveil more Linux-related announcements, you're out of luck. We've been waiting for details of the corporate desktop since last year and details remain sketchy. We've also waiting been for details of Sun's ultradense blade servers for what seems like forever (they were scheduled to roll out in November). So if the suspense is killing you, here are the specifications.

As Sun confirmed to us last June, there will be both SPARC and x86 versions of the new servers.

The density is impressive: 16 blades in a 3U cabinet. Both HP and Sun currently market "blade" computers that are "blades" in shape but not density. Sun's new offerings will be 650Mhz SPARC IIi and 800 Mhz Pentium IIIL. Both models will feature redundant power supplies and gigabit Ethernet. There's plenty of spare DIMM sockets to take allow each blade up to 4GB of memory. This configuration won't win any benchmarks, but it ought to offer a lot of compute power in a very small space - which is very much the point.