Sun Intros Blade Platform

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW - News) today introduced the Sun Blade(TM) 6000 Modular System, which redefines the datacenter lifecycle with up to double the memory and double the I/O capacity of competing blades and rackmount servers. The Sun Blade 6000 Modular System offers a choice of blades powered by the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads(TM) technology, Intel® Xeon® processors or AMD Opteron(TM) processors, allowing customers to deploy the industry's broadest range of applications ranging from virtualization, database, web tier and high performance computing (HPC) on a single common modular design.

The Sun Blade 6000 Modular System provides customers the most versatility of any blade platform. It uses the industry's highest performing microprocessors from Sun, Intel and AMD, and provides support for Solaris(TM), Windows and Linux operating systems. Its increased memory capacity and I/O bandwidth makes Sun Blade 6000 the optimal virtualization platform, enabling it to support large memory configurations at half the cost. In addition, the new systems have been designed to maximize customer investment by supporting microprocessors with four and eight cores. All this enables the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System to run virtually any enterprise application.

"With the three fastest processor platforms, three operating systems, the most memory and I/O bandwidth, Sun is delivering a system that enables customers to upgrade to virtualized blade platforms without the expense or technical compromises presented by all our competitors," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Sun Systems Group. "We are now offering the broadest support of volume architecture and operating systems in the industry - combined with the energy efficiency. The Sun Blade 6000 can be anyone's universal deployment platform."

Sun Microsystems Inc.