Sun Delivers Four-Socket, Quad-Core Xeon X8450 Blade Server

Published: February 26, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Packing as much computing power in a relatively static thermal envelope is the name of the game in the server business these days, and this week Sun Microsystems is ramping up its presence in the blade server space with a four-socket blade server based on Intel's "Tigerton" Xeon 7300 series of quad-core processors.

The new X8450 blade, which plugs into its Sun Blade 8000 chassis, supports from two to four of the Tigerton chips, which are a dual-core implementation of the Xeon MP-style of processors from Intel, which means they can be used in symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) configurations supporting four or more processors in a single system image. In this case, Sun is supporting up to four Tigerton processors, for a total of 16 cores that can share the 8 GB to 128 GB of DDR2 main memory on the X8450 blades. (That's a total of 32 DIMM slots, and those maximums assume customers install 4 GB DIMMs; Sun will support 256 GB configurations when 8 GB DIMMs become available and affordable.) Sun is supporting the 1.86 GHz L7345, the 2.13 GHz E7320, and the 2.4 GHz E7340 processors in the blades. The X8450 blade supports up to two hot-swap SAS or SATA disks in a power-efficient 2.5-inch form factor.

Sun says that the X8450 has been certified to run its own Solaris 10 Update 4 operating system, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 5 (both 32-bit and 64-bit) and Enterprise Linux 5 (64-bit only); Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (64-bit); Microsoft's Windows Server 2003, Standard and Enterprise Editions (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions), and VMware's ESX 3.0.2 hypervisor.

The X8450 blade will be available in March, with prices starting at $8,905.

Sun says that it has more than 300 customers who have bought its commercial blade machines since they were first launched in mid-2006, and in the recent product line, it has delivered eight blade servers (using a mix of Sparc T1 and T2, AMD Opteron, and Intel Xeon processors), four different chassis enclosures, and 17 different I/O peripherals that plug into the boxes. Sun is also keen to point out that it is number four in the market, behind Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Dell.

Sun already sells the X8420 blade, which is a two-socket based on dual-core Rev F "Santa Rosa" Opterons from AMD and which costs $11,095 in a base configuration, and also has the X8440 blade, which is based on either dual-core or quad-core Opterons and which has four processor sockets on the board, too. The latter machine was launched in September 2007, but AMD has been late shipping bug-free quad-core "Barcelona" Opterons that make this blade competitive with Intel's quad-core Tigertons. The base X8440 blade costs $12,875 and it is the blade that most closely resembles the X8450 that Sun announced this week at a much lower entry price.

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