Blades of Glory
2. HP BLADESYSTEM c3000
Businesses of all sizes—small, midsize, or enterprise—will want to get Shorty, which is the nickname HP has given its BladeSystem c3000 blade enclosure. Available as a rack or tower model, the c3000 supports up to eight multi-core, dual-processor half-height server or storage blades or four full-width blades in a 6U enclosure. The 10.5-inch design plugs into a standard 110- or 220-volt outlet, and does not require special power, cooling, or staff to operate, according to the company. Prices start at $4,299 for the blade enclosure; the compatible SB600c storage blade starts at $9,968 and has easy backup, archiving, and disaster recovery. http://www.hp.com/go/shorty
3. DELL POWEREDGE M-SERIES
The third time is the charm for Dell. The PowerEdge M-Series marks the company’s third entry into the blade market, except this time Dell is jumping on the green bandwagon with a unit that boasts low power consumption—reportedly up to 19 percent less than its competitors. The PowerEdge M1000e blade enclosure uses the company’s Energy Smart technologies, which spawned 30 new industry patents. The unit is a 10U enclosure, with support for 16 blade servers. It has been optimized for Dell PowerEdge M600 and M605 blades, which support up to two quad-core Intel Xeon processors and two dual-core AMD Opteron processors, respectively. The M1000e blade enclosure starts at $5,999; blades start at $1,849. http://www.dell.com/poweredge
4. SUN MICROSYSTEMS SUN BLADE 6000
Here comes the Sun—the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System, which boasts up to double the memory and I/O capacity of competing products. The 6000 enables you to choose between Sun UltraSPARC, Intel Xeon, or AMD Opteron processor-based server modules, as well as Solaris, Windows, and Linux operating systems in a single common chassis. The 10 RU chassis accommodates up to 10 blades per chassis, with up to four chassis per rack for a full capacity of to up to 320 cores, 2.5TB of memory, and 5Tbps of usable I/O throughput per rack. The chassis starts at $4,995; server module prices start at $5,995 for the Sun Blade T6300, $3,695 for the Sun Blade X6250, and $3,995 for the Sun Blade X6220. http://www.sun.com
