Sun Begins Shipping Opteron-Based ACTA Blade

Published: April 6, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As it promised it would, Sun Microsystems this week began shipments of its Opteron-based servers for its AdvancedTCA-compliant Netra blade servers. Both AMD and Sun were touting the new machine this week because it is part of AMD's Longevity Program, which guarantees a stable server platform for components used in the blade server.

Because telecom and service provider companies need to amortize their capital equipment costs over long time periods, they tend to not only want to keep an existing platform for a long time, but they need to be able to buy many of the same units for as long as a decade and get parts and support for these boxes for a much longer time frame than standard server components are offered.

Sun also divulged the pricing and features of this blade this week. The Netra CP3020 is a single-socket blade server that uses Opteron 100 series processors, either a single-core chip running at 2.2 GHz or a dual-core chip running at 1.8 GHz. The blade has four main memory slots, which support up to 4 GB of main memory using 1 GB DIMMs or twice that using 2 GB DIMMs, which are becoming more commonplace. Each blade can have two 73 GB SAS disk drives, and the blade can also have a compact flash drive spanning from 256 MB to 2 GB in size. The blade has been certified to run Solaris 10 or MontaVista Linux, which is a carrier-grade variant of the open source Linux platform. The whole blade is designed to stay below a 200-watt power envelope. A Netra CP3020 with a 2.2 GHz single-core Opteron chip and 2 GB of main memory costs $3,845. Which is one reason why your phone bill might go up.

While the blade server using the Opteron chip is ready now, Sun says that its Netra HA Suite for clustering these blades, which is popular among service providers, telecom companies, and network equipment providers, will not be ready until sometime later in the second quarter. Sun also reiterated that it will have a Netra blade based on its eight-core "Niagara" Sparc T1 processor to market by the end of the year. In a related announcement, Solid Information Technology announced that its solidDB, an in-memory database designed for telcos, has been tuned to run in the Netra HA environment. Sun and Solid will be peddling their products jointly when the database is available in the summer.