Sun to do Xeon and Niagara blade thing next month

Too much, too late?

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 22nd May 2007 19:23 GMT

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Sun Microsystems looks set to dish out its new UltraSPARC T1- and Xeon-based blades on June 6 at an event in Washington D.C.

Our invite and plane ticket seem to have been lost in the mail, but Sun customers have been told to show up for the unveiling of "an open design and featuring SPARC and x64 processors." None of this comes as a shock since Sun has spent years hinting at a single chassis that can hold SPARC and x86 blades.

Today, Sun sells a couple of chassis that run on Opteron-based blades. Next month, it should release a system code-named Wolf that is a four-socket Xeon-based box. That four-socket system will slot into Sun's existing chassis, as we reported last month. We're guessing that Sun will sell a two-socket blade as well and that the new products will be called the Sun Blade X6000 and X6220, respectively.

We're also guessing that Sun's UltraSPARC T1-based blade will be called the T6300, which was meant to ship in March.

Sun has been trying and failing at the blade game for quite awhile now.

A few years back, it went at the whole SPARC, x86 blade thing without much success. It then ignored the blade market altogether, allowing rivals HP and IBM to dominate. More recently, Sun put out a fresh blade server chassis - the Blade 8000 - which will hold the Opteron, Xeon and UltraSPARC T1 - aka Niagara - gear.

Dell too has struggled in the blade game and plans to ship a new system later this year that's very comparable to HP's c-Class box. ®

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