Sun's line of Galaxy servers will be adding an eight-socket version as well as a new blade server, reports Darrell Dunn with InformationWeek, who quotes Sun Executive Vice President John Fowler of the company's Network Systems Group as saying this will address the server consolidation and database server market and re-enter Sun into the blade server market.

This expansion of the Galaxy server line, namely the Sun FireTM X2100, Sun FireTM X4100 and Sun FireTM X4200 servers, is expected to take place sometime midyear.

Eight-socket Galaxy systems are already in use in several test sites, including at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, which has created a supercomputing grid of more than 5,000 dual-core Opteron processors from AMD that are based on a network of the eight-socket Galaxy servers. With eight dual-core Opteron processors in each server, Sun effectively creates a 16-way server platform.

The blade option will bring Sun back into the blade server market it left about two years ago when it withdrew support for a 2002 design of its first x86-based blade server that used an Intel Xeon processor. According to Fowler, the blade server market has matured significantly since that time.

Currently, blades comprise less than 3 percent of the total server market, Dunn reports. But, Fowler contends, "Over time blade servers are going to be a substantial percentage of the computing market, and that is without a doubt. The blade products are going to need to continue to improve before they can displace rackmount servers as the default building block...and that is what we have gone after with this design."

The Galaxy blade design will provide "differentiated value" over other blade servers in today's market, says Fowler, who points out that existing blade server offerings have failed to fully address the real reasons customers are beginning to implement blades - specifically, to get greater server density while reducing management complexity.

The blade server market currently is dominated by Dell, Egenera, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. [...read more...]

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