Photos: Sun servers on stage

John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun Microsystems’ systems\r\ngroup, shows the company’s new Sun Blade 8000 server chassis at a launch\r\nevent Tuesday in San Francisco. The system can accommodate as many as 10 four-processor blade servers.

Fowler removes a communications module from the back of the new Sun\r\nBlade 8000 server. All the server’s components are hot-swappable,\r\nmeaning that they can be removed or replaced without shutting the\r\nmachine down.

The Sun Blade 8000, code-named Andromeda, is 33.25-inch-tall blade server chassis that accommodates as many as 10 four-processor blade servers. It accepts Opteron blades now, and later it will accommodate blades with two models of Sun’s Sparc processors: the lower-end Niagara II and the higher-end Rock. Sun plans smaller blade-server chassis models in coming months.

Andy Bechtolsheim, a Sun cofounder and top designer of its x86-based\r\nserver line, discusses Sun’s new X4500 “Thumper” storage-server hybrid\r\nwith Fowler. The system, called StreamServe when it was under\r\ndevelopment at Bechtolsheim’s start-up, Kealiea, was originally intended\r\nas a media server. Sun canceled the system after acquiring Kealia in\r\n2004, but Fowler resurrected the design, which accommodates 48 hard\r\ndrives and 500 terabytes of capacity.

The Sun Fire X4500, code-named Thumper, has dual Opteron processors and accommodates as many as 48 hard drives, for a total storage capacity of 24 terabytes.

Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz makes the case that\r\ngeneral-purpose servers, such as the array of Sun “Galaxy” models behind\r\nhim, are ultimately more cost-effective than special-purpose models.

The Sun Fire X4600, code-named Galaxy4, accommodates as many as eight of AMD’s Opteron processors. It’s designed to support not just today’s dual-core chips, but quad-core Opterons due in 2007.