Because of its power, the Sun Blade 8000 really doesn't compare directly to the other blade systems in the test. The Dell and HP solutions can go three ways (standard server builds, HPC, and virtualization) but the Sun solution finds its sweet spot in HPC, high-end database, and virtualization tasks.

The Sun Blade 8000's hardware fits a virtualization build-out plan like a glove. Available I/O options are far better than the other blade systems, and the four sockets per blade, the NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) inherent in the AMD Opteron technology, and maximum RAM supported all make virtualization a foregone conclusion. As a VMware engineer speculated during testing the week after the blade server tests, 'Wow ' at standard loads with quad-core CPUs, this thing could support 600 virtual machines all by itself.' Enough said.

The 8000's management framework falls in line with Sun's N1 Network Manager, and the chassis' Web management interface is quite quick and usable. Of all the solutions tested, Sun's Java-based remote console application is the fastest and easiest to use, not to mention that it runs on all workstation platforms.

Sun's ILOM Web interface was not only the fastest, it was also the easiest to navigate of all three solutions. Working from the chassis Web UI, a single click will launch the console application with tabs linking to each blade's local console. Nice.

Backing up the UI is a set of redundant CMMs (Chassis Management Modules). Each module can be separately linked to the network via a single gigabit NIC and all share a common IP address, providing a fast fail-over in the event of hardware problems. The local ILOM card in each blade is also accessed via internal bridging to these Ethernet ports, so these links are very important to normal chassis operation.