socket blades, and HP's can accommodate eight, compared with 10 for the Sun Blade 8000.
Blades communicate with the external world through a PCI Express input-output system. One advantage of the design: "The blades can be completely stateless, including I/O," meaning that a task can easily be switched from one blade to another without onerous reconfiguration chores, said Insight64 analyst Nathan Brookwood.
Sun believes the time is right for multiprocessor x86 servers. Such systems have come and gone in the past, with Dell and HP both canceling their own eight-socket designs, while smaller one- and two-processor machines proliferated like rabbits, but Sun thinks things are different now.
For one thing, Sun agrees with IBM--which sells the 32-socket x460 Xeon server--that many companies want to employ virtualization to run many operating systems on one server, letting a single machine replace several smaller ones. Such an approach saves on electrical power, management personnel and real estate, said Insight64 Nathan Brookwood.
For another, Sun believes that with Solaris, x86 machines have a reliable operating system that can gracefully handle otherwise crushing workloads. And even though many more low-end systems are sold, Sun believes there's as much money spent on the smaller number of higher-end systems, Fowler said.
HP sees things differently. "Today, 99.8 percent of all x86 servers have between one and four sockets," said Mark Potter, vice president of HP's BladeSystem division. "The eight-socket market today--despite IBM's investment, and Sun I don't think is going to move this at all--was 0.7 percent of units shipped."
Sun is aiming the X4600 squarely at HP's four-socket Opteron-based DL585, with competitive pricing for a four-Opteron model, Fowler said. But while the systems are the same size--7 inches thick--Sun's can be upgraded to eight processors.
One reason HP and Dell favor smaller designs with four or fewer sockets is that individual processors themselves are getting more powerful. Chips these days have dual processing cores, and Intel and AMD plan quad-core designs in 2007.
For Sun, which will accommodate quad-core Opterons, that just means the opportunity for even beefier models. Fowler said the X4600 was designed with quad-core Opterons from the beginning. The systems also use AMD's higher-speed Opteron SC models, which run a notch faster but produce more waste heat.
When Sun acquired Kealia, it canceled its original product, an Opteron server with massive amounts of storage capacity. But when Fowler took over the division in 2004, he reversed that decision. The result is the X4500, 7 inches tall but able to house 48 Serial ATA hard drives in close proximity to dual Opteron processors.
"At Kealia, it was specifically for video, but it looked like storage," Fowler said. At Sun, "People were not sure what to do with it. I said let's resurrect it and bring it to market as a general-purpose platform."
Sun expects the X4500 to be used by companies that will package it with software and sell it for specific tasks--for example, housing streaming media or business intelligence, Fowler said.
Eunice sees the X4500 as a new beast that computing professionals will have to figure out.
"It's a genuine hybrid. It's not a server that has some attached disk, or storage that has a little bit of processing," he said. "It does meet in the middle."
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