Sun takes off in blade server market

Re-entering the blades market in 2006, Sun has since released 29 blade and supporting products, and gained over 300 customers in the blade server market. According to IDC, the vendor also tied fourth in blade server market share for factory revenue for Q3CY07.

Michael McNerney, Blades Server Product Line director, Sun Systems Group said: “Sun’s momentum in the blade server market is a testament to our innovative systems design and extreme blade performance and efficiency.”

Sun has been targeting various industries including financial services, energy and utilities, education, media, telecommunications, Government and Web 2.0. Recent Sun Blade customers include Gracenote, Italia Postel, Navisite, Stockcharts.com, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and University of Wisconsin.

"Our customers' feedback about the Sun Blade servers has been overwhelmingly positive. They are not only pleased with our ability to support multiple processor architectures and operating systems, but also with the complete package Sun can provide - servers, storage and software, backed by Sun services," said McNerney.

The Sun Blade X8450 server module features the four Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 5400 series, offers rackmount-level performance and throughput in a blade form factor, and has 32 DIMM slots.