"Sun's momentum in the blade server market is a testament to our innovative systems design and extreme blade performance and efficiency", stated Michael McNerney, Blades Server Product Line Director for Sun's Systems Group. "Our customers' feedback about the Sun Blade servers has been overwhelmingly positive. They are not only pleased with our ability to support multiple processor architectures and operating systems, but also with the complete package Sun can provide - servers, storage and software, backed by Sun services."

More than 300 enterprise customers have deployed Sun Blade products since the first product was introduced in 2006, ranging from diverse industries such as financial services, energy and utilities, media, education, telecommunications, government and Web 2.0. Recent Sun Blade customers include Gracenote, Italia Postel, Navisite, Stockcharts.com, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and University of Wisconsin.

TACC collaborated with Sun and AMD to deploy "Ranger" - the most powerful computing system in the world for open scientific research. Ranger, which is based on the Sun Constellation System and uses almost 63,000 Quad-Core AMD Opteron processing cores, entered full production on February 4 and had an official dedication ceremony in Austin, February 22.

As a result of this customer momentum, Sun tied for number 4 in blade server market share for factory revenue (Q3CY07), reflecting the value of a complete, truly differentiated blade portfolio spanning UltraSPARC, AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processor technologies.

Sun has reached other product and industry milestones in its blades portfolio, including:

• Development and commercial availability of 29 new blade products, including eight blade server modules, four chassis, and 17 I/O products.
• Launch of the Sun Blade Modular Solution portfolio - a new on-line portal that enables customers and solution partners to view, plan and gain support on a number of leading ISV applications for Sun Blade systems.
• Thirty-five record-breaking benchmarks with proven horizontal and vertical system scalability, as well as power efficiency, on diverse application workloads ranging from High Performance Computing (HPC) to virtualization to cryptography.
• New Sun Blade on-line community

The Sun Blade X8450 server module brings the computing power of four Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 7300 series to the Sun Blade 8000 family. It offers rackmount-level performance and throughput in a blade form factor, making it ideal for vitualization, HPC, database and other enterprise applications. It also includes 32 DIMM slots - an industry-leading 2 DIMMs per core - which offers customers the maximum capacity to power solutions in HPC and virtualization, yet allowing them to scale for future growth.

The Sun Blade 8000 Modular System now allows customers to choose between Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors along with a choice of industry-standard operating systems, including the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), Linux, Windows and VMware.

Other features of the Sun Blade X8450 server module include:

• 160 Gbps I/O throughput
• Four x8 PCIe lanes; two x4 PCIe lanes with integrated PCIe switching technology
• Sun Blade transparent management for seamless integration into existing management infrastructures
• Shared infrastructure designed for superior availability, with no fans or power supplies on the blades

The Sun Blade X8450 server module powered by Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors will be shipping next month with entry-level pricing starting at $8905.