Timothy Prickett Morgan over at the Register takes a look at new upgrades to Sun Blades from Oracle. These C48 systems were developed by Sun Microsystems for the HPC market, but are ideal for Oracle IT customers looking for high density and integrated high-speed networking.
Sun (Oracle) has not shown too much of an interest in this HPC market because the margins at the big supercomputer centers are pretty thin, but blade servers are nonetheless in demand at some commercial enterprises and Oracle needs to offer something when customers want blades. By moving up to the X6270 M2, Oracle is adding support for the Xeon 5600s (which we told you all about here back in March) to the same physical blade (or at least it looks that way in the pictures in the spec sheets). Oracle only supported 95, 80, and 60 watt parts in the original X6270 blades, but with the X6270 M2 you can use the 130 watt parts, which have four cores running at 3.46 GHz or six cores running at 3.33 GHz.
