John Fowler, executive VP of Sun Systems group, briefed reporters in San Francisco recently on the company's approach to blade server marketing as it has changed since the ill-fated spring of 2004 when the Sun FireTM B1600 and Sun FireTM B100/B200 product lines made far from the intended splash. Chris Preimesberger covered the news conference for eWeek, where it was reported as Sun Ready to Wage Blade Wars Against IBM, HP.

Fowler announced Sun's readiness to take on IBM and HP in the blade server market with its new line of super blades, plus an eight-processor server that is based on AMD's x64 Opteron chips. The Andromeda line is expected to hit the market no later than this September, Fowler said.

"Our initial group of blades (the B1600s) were low-powered, had very expensive engineering and were extremely limited in what they could do," Fowler said. "It's like anything else -— you go through a generation of a product, you see what others do, and you learn how to improve it.

"We were criticized for not doing a second-generation blade server, but we decided to let it go and work [far ahead] on the third generation, and get it right. We're making them so that everything is modular; only the chassis remains the same, and we're designing those to be good for at least five to seven years going forward," Fowler explained.

The Andromeda line, Fowler continued, will resemble rack-mounted servers by virtue of having more random access storage (RAS) features and by providing full I/O throughput while consuming less power. The Andromeda servers will also have easily upgradable CPUs, which have been separated from the I/O. "That's one of the big differences in our design. Once you put it in, you can replace anything inside it without taking the chassis out. These are built for clustering," he said.

Under consideration is a subscription model based on a fixed-cost pricing scale that customers can use to receive regular upgrades as well as regular service.

Both facilities planners and IT managers will appreciate the Andromenda line, Fowler predicted, explaining that, "by designing them with the data center in mind, we can help facilities planners with their long-term blueprints. IT managers can better amortize their systems with units that will last longer; with these plug-and-play servers, which have full I/O out of the box, you don't have to waste a lot of time configuring them."

In spite of the merged SPARCR and x64 server groups and the announced layoff plans at Sun, Fowler said the market date for the Andromeda server line will not be affected.

"Blade servers will end up supplanting rack servers over time, just as rack-mounted servers replaced tower servers. The time factor? Don't know, but this will happen," Fowler predicted confidently. [...read more...]

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