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Sun Releases New Servers, Blades & More

Posted by Hemos on from the rolling-out-the-new dept.

desau writes "This Yahoo article gives some tidbits on Sun's new toys that are being released today. Looks like they're aiming their guns at intel based systems with many new blade offerings and several small to midrange servers. The article also points out that they're lowering their prices on other servers." Probably a lot more information will come out from the web view - that starts @ 12:30 PM EST - but I think it'll take more than blade servers to make a difference in the future.Removed the first part of the link - the DoubleClick part was my copying link location, and not checking it - it should be correct now.

3 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. single-system-image blades by Twirlip+of+the+Mists · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Somebody needs to combine the high-density, inexpensive technology of blade servers with a scalable single-system-image design. I'd like to be able to take a single rack chassis, four units high or something, and put one CPU in it, or two, or fourteen, or whatever, but not have to dick around with clustering or load-balancing or something.

    SGI kind of went that direction with their Origin series (2000 and 3000, and now Altix), but they're overbuilt. It costs a fortune to buy an empty system, and a fortune to put processors and slots in it.

    Maybe somebody has done this already. I don't really keep up with the whole blade server thing very much. Anybody know?

    --

    I write in my journal
  2. Re:Doubleclick by desau · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Indeed! I was the one who posted the article, however the new bit on the end was NOT by me.. and I did NOT put a doubleclick link in my article.

    Is someone at /. trying to make a few bucks?

  3. Re:Sun equipment... by hackstraw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    a brand new Sun Workstation is nothing special...

    I really don't think that there servers are that much special either. When I saw the headline, I thought that Sun was going to announce some competative hardware (faster CPUs and higher memory bandwidth), but this was about blade servers (that you can get just about anywhere) and a 12 processor box (how many people need one of these?).

    I coadmin a Sun cluster (I think its like the biggest in the northern hemisphere), and admin an Alpha cluster. And although the hardware is excellent in terms of reliability and overall craftmanship, but they are too damn slow. At least for scientific computing. I've done some benchmarks on brand new 280s with the 900MHz processors (retail about 20k), and they perform as well or worse than an 800$ low end Dell (about 8 months old). Take a look at the Itanium2's performance. These guys are awsome. Memory bandwidth out the yazoo! 64bit addressing, nice machines. We're getting 3 of em soon :)

    I loved this line from the article: Sun's been criticized heavily for sticking to its own Sparc processors and Solaris operating system.

    Umm, so if they don't do this, then what do they do? Become an integrator or a reseller? One thing I will give Sun, is Solaris is pretty damn nice.

    I will give one thing to Sun's boxes/Solaris. They might not be fast, but then again they never really slow down. I've seen Sun boxes that are almost completely out of memory and have a load of like 10 or 20 (maybe higher, don't remember on a 1 cpu box), and they are completely usable! Compared to my dual Alpha's running Linux, if they are paging hard and the load is about 4-6 it can take a couple of minutes just to log into one of em.

    All in all I like Suns, but they look like they are setting themselves up to be an orphaned division of some other company.