About the Sun Blade 8000 Series Modular Systems

The Sun BladeTM 8000 Series are blade server platforms optimized for high-performance applications that place great demands on CPU performance, memory capacity, and I/O bandwidth. The Sun Blade 8000 Series includes the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System, which is built with a 19 rack unit (19U) tall chassis, and the Sun Blade 8000 P Modular System, which is built with a 14 rack unit (14U) tall chassis.

The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System is designed for business and mission-critical applications that require high compute density, maximized I/O capacity, and N+N power configuration for high availability. The Sun Blade 8000 P Modular System is designed for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications such as compute grids that need high performance, scalability, and compute density with lower I/O requirements and tolerance for N+1 power configuration.

Both platforms deliver high reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) capabilities by aggregating 10 Server Modules (blades) into a common chassis with hot-pluggable and redundant components for processing, I/O, networking, system management, power, and cooling. Server Modules, Network Express Modules, and Chassis Monitoring Modules are interchangeable between the two platforms.

The Sun Blade 8000 Series is designed for ease of use by either the customer for user-upgradeable components or by authorized service personnel. Both chassis provide for ongoing upgrades and future expansion with consolidated power and cooling modules that can support current and future CPU and memory configurations, ensuring that the chassis lifecycle will span multiple generations of blade upgrades. As technology changes, you can simply upgrade modules independent of the chassis. In addition, upgrades can be made without a change to management practices because you can use existing tools to interact with, manage, and monitor the Server Modules. The Sun Blade 8000 Series provides a unified, yet flexible architecture that enables you to consolidate multiple operating environments and applications.

For detailed descriptions of the systems and their components, see:

Modular Component Features

The Sun Blade 8000 Chassis and Sun Blade 8000 P Chassis support modular components that enable you to configure your system uniquely for your computing requirements. The following table summarizes the main components that you can configure in either chassis.

Modules

Sun Blade 8000 Modular System

Sun Blade 8000 P Modular System

Sun Blade Server Modules (blades)

10

10

AMD Opteron dual-core processors

4 per X8400 and X8420 Server Modules

4 or 2 per X8440 Server Module

4 per X8400 and X8420 Server Modules

4 or 2 per X8440 Server Module

Intel Xeon quad-core processors

4 or 2 per X8450 Server Module

4 or 2 per X8450 Server Module

Hard drives supported

2 drives per Server Module

SAS (73 or 146 Gbytes) or SATA (80 Gbytes) per X8400, X8420, or X8440 Server Modules

SAS (73 or 146 Gbytes) or SATA (200 Gbytes) per X8450 Server Module

2 drives per Server Module

SAS (73 or 146 Gbytes) or SATA (80 Gbytes) per X8400, X8420, or X8440 Server Modules

SAS (73 or 146 Gbytes) or SATA (200 Gbytes) per X8450 Server Module

PCI Express ExpressModules (EMs)

20

N/A

Network Express Modules (NEMs)

Up to 4

Up to 2

Chassis Monitoring Modules (CMMs)

Up to 2

Up to 2

Power supplies

6 (N+N)

4 (N+1)

Management firmware

ILOM preinstalled on CMM and blade service processor

ILOM preinstalled on CMM and blade service processor

Chassis per 42U rack

2

3