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.
However, responding to Sun's benchmarking figures, the system x brand manager at IBM's systems and technology group, Dean Janjic, said blade servers are about more than CPU's.
Janjic said IBM holds the number one market share position worldwide for blade based servers, and has led the market since launching its BladeCentre range back in 2002.
He said BladeCentre customers have a wide array of CPU technologies to choose from including Intel Corp., AMD, Power and even Cell based multi-core blades.
"Some competitors are limited to a few or even one type of CPU technology; but we recognize customers have varying application requirements and budgets," Janjic said.
"IBM also offers customers the choice of either two or four socket blades. In fact, the IBM LS41 is the industry's only four socket capable blade that offers true pay as you grow upgradability.
"Customers can buy a single wide, two socket LS41 blade that is upgradable to a four socket blade. This means customers have the choice to pay for the compute power they need now and have an easy upgrade path to greater compute power, using the existing investment they have made."
While IBM continues to dominate market share, competition is certainly heating up.
Last year, Sun rebounded in the server market as sales grew of its Galaxy and Niagara machines.
Sun was the fourth-largest server vendor in revenue worldwide in the third quarter of 2006, behind leader IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell Inc., according to figures from analyst firm IDC. Sun had around 10 percent market share to IBM's 33.1 percent.
Blades remain the market segment experiencing the highest growth rates.