Sun Microsystems is getting back into the blade business, John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's Systems Group, said in an interview with CRN Monday.
Fowler, who recently took the helm of the Sun's combined SPARC and x64 product groups as part of a corporate reorganization, said Sun has already briefed many of its channel partners on a plan to offer blades and an eight-way server based on AMD's x64 Opteron chips.
He declined to pinpoint the ship date beyond saying they will come "soon." Sun, which maintains a strong partnership with AMD, may time the new offerings with the arrival of AMD's next-generation Opteron with DDR2 memory, expected in the third quarter.
Fowler said Sun is working on "third-generation" blades with a chassis that has been architected to stay with customers for five to seven years. He said Sun thought carefully about power, I/O, management and backplane requirements necessary to support a system over that time period.
"We have separated the I/O from the blade itself," he said. "That's one of the differences in our design."
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