Sun blade system claims benchmark lead

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 07 June 2007 05:22

Your IT - Home IT

Sun claims its Blade 6000 Modular System provides greater memory and I/O capacity than competing products as well as delivering superior benchmark performance.

The range includes blades with UltraSPARC T1, dual quad-core Intel Xeon or dual AMD Opteron CPUs. Up to 10 blades can be installed in each chassis, and up to four chassis per rack.

The Opteron and Xeon blades accommodate a maximum of 64G or RAM, while the the UltraSPARC model tops out at 32G. All three can be fitted with up to  four 2.5in SAS or SATA hard disk drives. Up to 320 processor cores, 2.5T of memory and 5Tbps of "usable" I/O throughput are therefore available in one rack.

The Xeon blade has set a new record for x86 integer performance on the SPECint2006 benchmark, the UltraSPARC blade is the fastest single-processor system under SPECjbb2005 (Java Virtual Machine scalability), and the Opteron blade provides record performance on SPEC OMPM2001, a measure for shared memory servers executing compute-intensive scientific applications.

"With the introduction of the Sun Blade 6000 system, Sun has made it extremely easy to choose the appropriate architecture for the task, be it SPARC, Intel or AMD," said Chuck Sears, manager of research computing at Oregon State University's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Science. "With a unified single chassis design and a common management infrastructure our data center clutter finally can be addressed with out compromising the unique architectural needs of our tasks."

The system has been designed for optimum cooling and airflow for higher reliability and power efficiency, Sun officials said.

The Sun Blade 6000 supports Solaris, Windows and Linux plus most standard management interfaces for integration with existing infrastructure. The provision of PCI-Express I/O interfaces means off-the-shelf adaptors can be added to the system.

"With the three fastest processor platforms, three operating systems, the most memory and I/O bandwidth, Sun is delivering a system that enables customers to upgrade to virtualized blade platforms without the expense or technical compromises presented by all our competitors," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Sun Systems Group.

"We are now offering the broadest support of volume architecture and operating systems in the industry - combined with the energy efficiency. The Sun Blade 6000 can be anyone's universal deployment platform."

Prices start at $US4995 for the chassis and $US3695 per blade.