Hoping to make inroads in the high-growth blade segment of the server market, Sun Microsystems has released a new blade along with a U.S. subscription service offering customers several automatic refreshes of the server hardware.The Sun Blade X8420 is powered by four-socket dual-core 2.8GHz Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Opteron 8000 chips. Announced Tuesday, the server includes hot-pluggable I/O adapters that can be accessed from outside the box. The blade comes with PCIe ExpressModules supporting Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand technologies so users can mix applications requiring different I/O configurations within the same blade chassis.Sun also introduced the Sun Refresh Service, a subscription offering that will enable Sun customers in the United States to update blades within two months of new servers becoming available. Sun will provide three refreshes of the blades over a 42-month period, delivering and installing the new servers and removing the old ones.Last year, Sun rebounded in the server market as sales grew of its Galaxy and Niagara machines. The Galaxy line of servers is based on AMD’s Opteron chips, while the Niagara machines use Sun’s UltraSparc processors. Sun was the fourth-largest server vendor in revenue worldwide in the third quarter of 2006, behind leader IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, according to figures from analyst IDC in November. Sun had around 10 percent market share to IBM’s 33.1 percent.Blades remain the market segment experiencing the highest growth rates, so Sun’s keen to make more of an impression there particularly. After failing to capture users’ interest with its first attempts at blades a couple of years ago, Sun re-entered the market in July 2006 with its Sun Blade 8000 design, then released a smaller 8000 P chassis in November. The blades use AMD’s Opteron chips, and Sun is expected to come out with Niagara-based blades later this year. Entry-level pricing for the Sun Blade X8420 starts at US$13,095 per server module while the monthly subscription rate for the Sun Refresh Service is $23,000. Customers can also pay on a quarterly or annual basis for the subscription service, which is initially available only in the United States.In other Sun news, the vendor announced the latest version of Solaris Cluster, software that can be used to improve the availability of applications running on its Solaris 10 operating system. Sun also positions the cluster software as a business continuity and disaster recovery platform for Solaris 10 applications, spreading the computing load across machines to avoid the possibility of a problem with a single server bringing the entire system down.Sun said it has made improvements in the new release of Sun Cluster so it’s easier to use and provides better support for Solaris Containers virtualization software. The vendor also offers more support for third-party software configurations such as replication and storage offerings from Oracle, EMC, Hitachi and Symantec.—China Martens, IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage. Related content opinion Website spoofing: risks, threats, and mitigation strategies for CIOs In this article, we take a look at how CIOs can tackle website spoofing attacks and the best ways to prevent them. By Yash Mehta Dec 01, 2023 5 mins CIO Cyberattacks Security brandpost Sponsored by Catchpoint Systems Inc. Gain full visibility across the Internet Stack with IPM (Internet Performance Monitoring) Today’s IT systems have more points of failure than ever before. Internet Performance Monitoring provides visibility over external networks and services to mitigate outages. By Neal Weinberg Dec 01, 2023 3 mins IT Operations brandpost Sponsored by Zscaler How customers can save money during periods of economic uncertainty Now is the time to overcome the challenges of perimeter-based architectures and reduce costs with zero trust. By Zscaler Dec 01, 2023 4 mins Security feature LexisNexis rises to the generative AI challenge With generative AI, the legal information services giant faces its most formidable disruptor yet. That’s why CTO Jeff Reihl is embracing and enhancing the technology swiftly to keep in front of the competition. By Paula Rooney Dec 01, 2023 6 mins Generative AI Digital Transformation Cloud Computing Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe