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Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday rolled out new hardware and software designed to enable major telecommunications companies to offer more reliable and flexible products.
At the ITU Telecom Asia 2002 conference in Hong Kong next month, Sun will show off its new CompactPCI telecom blade servers, the CT 410 and 810 servers.
The Santa Clara, Calif., company also announced its Netra CP2140 and CP2160 compact PCI blades and upgraded Netra HA (High Availability) Suite Foundation Services.
The new offerings are part of Suns push to provide telecom companies with open platforms upon which their customers can build, said Kirk Mosher, group product marketing manager for Netra Systems for Sun.
“Traditionally, these are proprietary platforms,” Mosher said, adding that demand for such offerings as wireless multimedia capabilities and voice over IP technology is fueling the push toward off-the-shelf products.
The 410 and 810 platforms can scale up to 16 processor blades per shelf and 48 processor blades per rack, according to Sun. They also offer such management features as remote alarm function, and the management software provides easy connectivity to high-availability software running the Solaris operating system.
In addition, they offer hot-swap control of all components of the servers.
The blades used in the servers, the CP2140 and CP2160, use the UltraSparc IIi 650MHz chip, giving them 50 percent better performance than their predecessors, the Netra CP2040 and CP2060/CP2080 blades, Sun said.
The CP2140 includes dual 10/100 Ethernet and SCSI slots and up to 4GB of RAM. The CP2160 works with the CP2140, acting as a satellite processor blade. It has front and rear I/O and 10/100 Ethernet slots, 8MB of User Flash and 3GB of memory, according to Sun.
The new software, the Netra HA Suite Foundation Services 2.1, enables users to build high-availability platforms with no single point of failure, Mosher said. The software supports soft partitioning, enhanced IP service and cluster management.
Software installation and deployment tools are aimed at easing development costs, Sun said.
The CT 410 and 810 servers are available now starting at $19,195. The CP2140 blade, available now, starts at $3,995; the CP2160, available in early 2003, will start at $4,395.
The Netra HA Suite Foundation Services also is available now.