How Much is that Power in the Cabinet?

The new Sun Blade 6048 is an appealing platform to those people who need about 48 blade servers. With LDoms on the UltraSPARC T1 and T2 blades and multiple O/S choices for the AMD and Intel powered blades (Windows, Linux, Solaris and VMware), the 6048 makes a great consolidation platform.

The new Sun xVM Ops Center software will make managing a single cabinet with a large number mixed blades with mixed O/S environments feasible.

However, loading up the Sun Blade 6048 with blades, memory, disks and I/O options can expand the power required to "interesting" levels. The 6048 supports N+N redundant 5,600W or 8,400W AC Power Supply configurations (2 per shelf / 8 per rack).

Will it really consume that much power? One way to find out is to use the blade power calculator on Sun's blade web site. The calculator allows you to choose blades and their configurations of disk, memory and i/o.

Adding 48 UltraSPARC T1 blades will require about 10Kw to 15Kw.

With quad-core Xeons and 64GB per blade, the power requires will be in the 20 Kw to 24Kw range.