Sun has designed, and now released to the market, the first blade virtualization solution, the Sun FireTM Blade Platform, which enables users to combine and manage the SolarisTM Operating Environment (Solaris OE), Linux, SPARCR processor and x86 architectures, along with special function blades, in a single chassis. Another new product, the N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition, is the platform's management environment, which gives administrators the ability to manage up to 20 times the number of servers and reduce deployment time from days to hours.

"This isn't just a server built with blades -- the Sun Fire Blade Platform represents a new way of quickly integrating network elements to create a flexible computing environment," said Neil Knox, executive vice president of Sun's Volume Systems Products Group. "Our Blade Platform takes network computing to a new level; incorporating N1 products, storage, network elements, applications and services -- all designed to speed deployment while reducing cost and complexity. Sun stands apart from competitors by creating a network computer rather than just a bunch of processing blades."

The Sun FireTM B1600 Intelligent Shelf, an important element in the Sun Blade Platform, gives users the ability to combine up to 16 general purpose or special function blades. In addition to multi-architecture blades, the 16 can include Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Proxy and Content Load Balancing blades, the N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition, the SunTM Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) middleware and SunTM ONE Grid Engine software, as well as the Sun StorEdgeTM 3310 NAS product. (The Sun ONE Grid Engine software was formerly SunTM Grid Engine software.) Both general purpose and specialty blades can be managed from a single interface with Lights Out Management (LOM) capabilities because of the Intelligent Shelf's integrated layer 2 switching and system controllers.

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition allows users to design, configure, provision and scale blade-based server farms by discovering blade platform hardware, creating a pool of these resources and presenting a logical view of the blade platform. Hardware allocation, image provisioning and network configuration issues are managed in a manner that reduces the time administrators need to spend on design and deployment of server farms.

Management of RAID storage for the Sun Fire Blade Platform is easily accomplished with the Sun StorEdge 3310 NAS Product, which has over three times the density and twice the bandwidth of competing products, optimizing resource allocation and making the most efficient use of floor space.

Sun plans to begin support through its SunSM Customer Ready Systems (CRS) for large-scale deployments of the Blade Platform and N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition in Q203 by shipping customer configurations factory installed and tested. Traditional, on-site installation services are currently available through Sun CRS. [...read more...]

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