Sun Microsystems, Inc has announced a new solution for network computing, the Sun Fire Blade Platform, and the industry's first blade virtualisation solution.
Designed as the first multi-architecture blade offering, the Sun Fire Blade Platform is the only blade system enabling customers to mix, match and manage Solaris and Linux operating systems, SPARC and x86 architectures and special function blades in the same chassis.
Sun's first N1 (Network One) software product, the N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition, also serves as the platform's management environment, enabling IT administrators to manage 20 times more servers than ever before. It also allows server farm deployment time to be slashed from days or weeks to under an hour.
"In an age where customers are expecting more from their computing infrastructure with less capital at their disposal, the N1 architecture presents a compelling value proposition. Critical areas that make up the total cost of ownership of IT infrastructure are addressed by the combination of the blade server platform, the N1 Provisioning Server software and the StorEdge 3310 NAS," says Dumisani Mtoba, senior systems engineer at Sun Microsystems SA.
The Blade Platform is designed to speed deployment while reducing cost and complexity, by delivering a network computer rather than just a bunch of processing blades.
"Three years ago, it could take 122 cables, 1 568 watts of power and two days to set up a rack of 32 pizza box-sized servers. Today, with the Sun Fire Blade Platform, one person can have that same computing power up and running in under two hours - from loading dock to power on - using only two shelves of blades, 12 cables and 650 watts of power. This helps companies equip their operations staff for better efficiency and rolling out new services more rapidly," Mtoba says.
The company's first N1 software product is part of its multi-platform, multi-vendor operating environment for network computing "The N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition enables customers to rapidly design, configure, provision and scale blade-based server farms. During installation, N1 software discovers the blade platform hardware, adds those resources to a pool from which server farms can be built and presents a logical view of the blade platform - all via a graphical user interface," he explains.
Unlike conventional management methods, the N1 software takes care of details such as hardware allocation, image provisioning and network configuration so IT administrators can design and deploy server farms quickly and easily.
"The recent proliferation of servers in data centres, and the attendant complexity they introduce, has compelled organisations to embark on server consolidation projects. At face value the introduction of blade servers appears to be the reverse of this trend.
"Indeed, with Blade servers under the management of the N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 product, complexity is removed and customers are able to benefit from a low cost server platform that does not require an army of administrators to manage," Mtoba adds.
Completing the solution is Sun's StorEdge 3310 NAS product, specifically designed to provide easily managed RAID storage for the Sun Fire Blade Platform. "Sun's rack-dense, real-estate efficient design provides a combined server/storage offering only five rack units high," says Mtoba.
"In an age where customers are expecting more from computing infrastructures with less capital at their disposal, the architecture presents a compelling value proposition. Critical areas that make up the total cost of ownership of an IT infrastructure are addressed by the combination of the blade server platform, the N1 Provisioning Server software and the StorEdge 3310 NAS," he concludes.
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Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision - "The Network Is The Computer" - has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com.
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