With the entry of the B1600 Intelligent Shelf, the other name for this blade chassis from Sun, the company is allowing customers to mix and match two different styles of blade servers in a single machine and all under the control of its so-called N1 systems management and blade provisioning software. One blade is based on a 650MHz UltraSparc-IIi processor, while the other is based on an unnamed X86 processor of unknown speed. (Sun refuses to give out the specs on the processor at the heart of this blade, but it is widely believed to be a 1.2GHz Pentium III processor from Intel Corp, a company that Sun has no lost love for. However, it is possible that Sun is using a 1.4GHz Pentium III processor, a 900MHz Pentium III Ultra Low Voltage variant, or even an AMD, Transmeta or Cyrix clone of an Intel X86 processor.) Either of these blades can be equipped with up to 2GB of main memory and a 30GB or 40 GB ATA-IDE hard disk drive, which is used right now to house an instance of an operating system for each blade. Sun says that an average blade will crank out about 18 watts of heat.
When you do the math, that comes to 14 B1600 chassis per 42U rack, or 224 processors per rack. Hewlett Packard Co has been able to cram 20 blades using the Pentium III ULV chips into a chassis to get 280 processors per rack with its ProLiant BL10e, which would suggest that Sun is not using the Pentium III ULV chips or else it would get similar densities. Sun has also announced a 2U NAS disk array called the StorEdge 3310 that crams 824GB of disk capacity into that small form factor, and three of these can be daisy chained together per B1600 chassis for a total of 2.4TB. Cramming 16 processors and 2.4TB of disk capacity in a 9U form factor is something that a lot of companies are going to find attractive.
Colin Fowles, director of the blade business team for Sun’s Volume Systems Products group, says that Sun will eventually deliver a diskless blade that can allow OS instances to be stored out on SAN disk arrays, in keeping with Sun’s desire to provide stateless components that can be reprovisioned very quickly and on the fly. He also confirmed that Sun would deliver two-way capable blades in the third quarter for the B1600 chassis. We’ve heard that the two-way Sparc-based blade will be based on a 900MHz UltraSparc-IIi processor and that the two-way X86 blade will be based on a 1.4GHz Pentium III chip from Intel, but these could well change.
The Sparc blades can run Solaris 8 at the 12/02 release (no Solaris 9 as yet), and the X86 blades can run Linux or Solaris 8 for X86. Blades running any of the three variants possible can be mixed in the same chassis. Sun has not said what Linux distribution it will use, but it is very likely its own variant on Red Hat Linux, just like it is shipping on its LX50 server line. In theory, the X86 blade server should be able to run any other operating system – including Windows – and it probably won’t be too long before someone hacks it onto one of these servers just to show it can be done.
Sun’s pricing on its Web site is only available for the Sparc-based machines. A B100 blade with one 650MHz US-IIi processor, 512MB of main memory, a 30GB disk, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and Sun’s Advanced Lights Out Manager software sells for $1,795. Sun is not providing estimated ship dates for orders, which is often the case with new products. With 1GB of main memory, the B100 blade costs $2,045, and with 2GB of memory it costs $2,995. The B1600 blade chassis has two 24-port Gigabit switches and two system controllers, with 16 of these ports going to the blades and 8 ports going out to external devices like NAS arrays or other shelves. A base B1600 chassis costs $4,795. Sun is also charging $3,920 for a license to the N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition, which is used to control the blades in a chassis.
In addition to generic Sparc-Solaris and X86-Solaris/Linux blades, Fowles says that Sun has worked with an unspecified third party company to create an SSL accelerator blade and a load balancing blade that companies can put into these B1600 chassis. These special blades are not just versions of the Sparc or X86 blades with software on them, but rather unique blades with these workloads burned into their electronics to make them very efficient and secure.
Sun says that these Sun Fire Blade Platform products will be available sometime in the second quarter of 2003, but does not say when. This is not in keeping with Sun’s general practice of announcing products only when it can ship them. Sun is now behaving just like the rest of the computer market always has, by launching future products ahead of their deliveries to confound its rivals. It was bound to happen. The pressure on Sun to get its next generation of products out the door is enormous, just as it is on IBM, HP, and others. Fowles says that the SSL and load balancing blades will be available in March, which is also probably when the other generic blades will be available.
Source: Computerwire
