That rack had better have plenty of power and cooling, though, as the Sun Blade 8000 draws a significant amount of juice, requiring approximately 9kW (actual draw is generally lower). That's quite a lot compared with the HP and Dell blades, which pull roughly 3.6kW each. Luckily, the Sun system's density makes up for its power thirst.

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It took Sun's engineers quite some time to get the tests up and running, and the Sun Blade 8000's results in the SPEChpc benchmark weren't the best. They did better in the SPECseis test, and I'm certain that if they were given more time to optimize the other two tests, Sun's overall results would have been much better.

Sun's X8400 Server Modules are large, each with two 2.5-inch SAS or SATA drives and a RAID0/1 controller. Memory expands to 64GB per blade with 4GB DIMMs, granting a fully populated chassis a total of 640GB of RAM across 40 sockets. Those sockets can hold Opteron 870s at 2.0Ghz, 875s at 2.2Ghz, or 885s at 2.6Ghz, all with 1MB L2 cache. And last week, Sun announced availability of AMD Rev F processors in its new X8420 Server Modules.

I/O options are plentiful. Each blade can handle as many as six different external I/O forms, and there are two different methods of delivering the physical I/O ports to the blades themselves. The X8400 is more focused on pass-through ports than using integrated switching; it has wide Network Express Modules that aggregate a single 8x PCI Express lane from each blade, as well as smaller Express Modules also leveraging a single 8x PCI Express lane, but built into the slim PCI-SIG form factor. These smaller modules reside at the top of the chassis, and are designed to provide more granular I/O access to each blade.

The two NEM modules in our test unit delivered four gigabit Ethernet ports to each blade. The InfiniBand interfaces slotted into the Express Modules, delivering two InfiniBand ports to each blade on a single module. This design is quite flexible and its hot-swap capability is certainly attractive.

Although the Sun Blade 8000 is technically a blade system, it fits the image of a modular server system. The raw horsepower available across each blade's four sockets and the impressive array of modular I/O options position the system directly into the HPC and virtualization arena. This is not a system to run simple Web or directory servers — unless they're virtualized.

Virtualization-ready
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.