Sun takes on IBM in Australian battle of the blades

11.01.2007
Within days of launching the "fastest blade server on the planet," Sun Microsystems Inc. has revealed plans to introduce a subscription service in Australia that provides customers with automatic refreshes of server hardware.

The Sun Refresh Service allows customers to update blades within two months of new servers becoming available. Sun provides three refreshes of the blades over a 42-month period, delivering and installing the new servers and removing the old ones.

The subscription service is currently available in the U.S. and Sun is considering plans to make the offering available in Australia by the end of 2007.

While Sun's Australia-New Zealand Systems Product Manager James Eagleton, was unwilling to confirm details about launching the service locally, he was keen to talk about the new Sun Blade X8420 server module which is powered by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Opteron 8000 series processors.

"It is the only blade server to offer 4-socket dual-core 2.8GHz processors and delivers up to 16 times the throughput of competing 4-socket blade and rack-mount servers," Eagleton said. "The server has outperformed the competition on a variety of industry-standard benchmarks and set an 8-thread world record making it the fastest blade server on the planet." Eagleton claims the new record result surpasses the competing IBM Corp. System p5 550 and Hewlett-Packard Co. ProLiant DL585 scores by 16 percent and 29 percent respectively.

He said the Sun Blade X8420 server module posted two x86 world records on both floating point and integer-intensive suites of the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark.