The Sun Blade brand name has been used twice by Sun Microsystems, firstly for a line of computer workstations sold from 2000 to 2006, and also for a line of blade server systems sold from 2006 onwards.

Workstations

The Sun Blade workstation line was based on the UltraSPARC microprocessor family. The range replaced the earlier Sun Ultra workstation series.

The Sun Blade series were supplanted by the Sun Java Workstation line in 2004. Sun also later revived the "Ultra" brand for workstations in the form of the Ultra 20 and 40 workstations. Despite the name, these models are based on the AMD Opteron processor rather than the UltraSPARC architecture. In 2006, the UltraSPARC-based Ultra 25 and Ultra 45 workstations were introduced, finally officially replacing the Sun Blade 1500 and Blade 2500 respectively.

Sun Blade workstations models

Blade servers

In June 2006, Sun announced the AMD Opteron-based Sun Blade 8000 modular blade server system. The Sun Blade 8000 chassis can hold up to 10 Sun Blade X8420 or X8440 modules.

The following year, the Sun Blade 6000 system was launched. This allowed mixed UltraSPARC and x64 architecture blades. The Sun Blade T6300 and T6320 modules run Solaris and use UltraSPARC T1 and UltraSPARC T2 processors respectively, while the Sun Blade X6220 and X6250 modules use AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon 5000-series processors respectively.

The X-series blades support Solaris, Linux, Windows Server 2003 or VMware.

External links

• Sun System Handbook
• Sun System Handbook, v2.1
• Sun blade servers

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