Photos: Sun servers on stage

Fowler removes a communications module from the back of the new Sun Blade 8000 server. All the server's components are hot-swappable, meaning that they can be removed or replaced without shutting the machine down.

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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.

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Andy Bechtolsheim, a Sun cofounder and top designer of its x86-based server line, discusses Sun's new X4500 "Thumper" storage-server hybrid with Fowler. The system, called StreamServe when it was under development at Bechtolsheim's start-up, Kealiea, was originally intended as a media server. Sun canceled the system after acquiring Kealia in 2004, but Fowler resurrected the design, which accommodates 48 hard drives and 500 terabytes of capacity.

Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com

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 Microsystems

Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz makes the case that general-purpose servers, such as the array of Sun "Galaxy" models behind him, are ultimately more cost-effective than special-purpose models.

Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com

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.

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