The Sun Fire B1600 Intelligent Shelf and its highly available system components, along with the Sun Fire B100s SPARC Blade Server and other specialty blades enables the customer to build flexible and scalable IT infrastructures that uses computing resources more efficiently, reduces time-to-market by shortening deployment cycles, increases availability, and lowers operational cost.

The Sun Fire B1600 Intelligent Shelf offers the following powerful features:

• 5.33 CPUs per rack unit compared to rack-optimized one processor 1U servers
• An Intelligent Shelf offering integrated dual Gigabit Ethernet, redundant power supplies, separate management network, service indicator lights, customer replaceable and hot-swappable components and space for up to 16 blades
• Mix and match SPARC/Solaris Blade, x86/Solaris and Linux Blades, and Specialty Blades (SSL or load balancing Blades) in the same chassis
• Simplified deployment for ease of use
• Dramatically improved serviceability
• Optimized for rack environment with integrated switches and system controllers
• Optimized for integrated network
• Simplified cable management in which all Blade Servers plug into a common midplane, with no cabling required

Product Family Placement
The Sun Fire B1600 Intelligent Shelf, or chassis, forms the foundation of the Sun Fire Blade Platform. In addition to the Sun Fire B1600 Intelligent Shelf, components of the Sun Blade Platform include the N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition , Sun Fire B100s SPARC Blade Server, the Sun Fire SSL Proxy Specialty Blade, Sun Fire Content Load Balancing Specialty Blade, and Sun StorEdge 3310 NAS.

Key Users
The Sun Fire Blade Platform is suitable for users who want to optimize deployment and management of services by increasing resource utilization and maximizing efficiency.

Key Markets
The Sun Fire B1600 Intelligent Shelf is ideal for horizontally scaled applications or distributed applications in such areas as:

• Enterprise Data Centers
• Financial Services
• Service Provider
• Technical Computing

System Architecture
The Sun Fire Blade Platform is a network-centric, industry standard based, heterogeneous Blade Server Platform.

Scalability and Horizontal Scaling
Sun Fire B100s server is designed from the outset to be an excellent platform for hosting horizontally scalable applications, that is, those which do not depend upon symmetric multi processing to provide increased performance in a multi processor environment. Horizontally scaled systems achieve high performance by dividing the application load from the clients between replicated application instances each running on it own server. Each Sun Fire B100s Blade is a discrete server running its own instance of the Solaris Operating Environment and applications. Up to 16 SPARC Sun Fire B100s Blade Servers can fit in a 3U Intelligent Shelf. Integrated Gigabit Ethernet interconnect delivers high speed built-in networking services to each blade for communicating with peers and accessing additional resources such as storage and backup.

Heterogenous Platform
The Sun Fire B1600 Intelligent Shelf and can be used in conjunction with future SPARC/Solaris blades, x86/Solaris and Linux blades, and a choice of Specialty blades. All current and future general purpose blades will be compatible with Sun ONE Studio and Sun ONE middleware. This allows one to optimize for their application requirements for growing business needs and changing requirements.

Intelligent Shelf
The Sun Fire B1600 Intelligent Shelf supports up to two dual system controllers for administration and monitoring, and provides a private/secure interface to system and service management. In addition, it includes dual layer 2 switches for flexible VLAN configurations, offers connectivity to data networks, and provides a secure bridge between the Blade Server chassis and external management networks. Sun Fire Blade Server Platform enables network architecture design to support redundancy at higher levels than the chassis. Individual or groups of blades can be made redundant through load balancing. Such simplicity makes it easier to meet stringent service level requirements.

Systems Management
The management of the Sun Fire B1600 Intelligent Shelf and Sun Fire blades operates at several levels:

• Blade and Shelf Level Setup and Configuration
  Browser-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) interfaces and comprehensive, industry-standard Command Line Interfaces (CLIs) are available for configuring the switches and the other shelf components. This functionality extends to VLAN configuration, user administration, fault diagnosis, and repair.
  
• Monitoring of Blade Servers and Shelf Components
  Using industry-standard Small Network Management Protocol (SNMP), it is possible to integrate Sun Fire blade into any compatible customer monitoring environment.
  • Monitor and report hardware and environmental status
  • Aggregate interface for replacing and restarting CRUs
  • Inventory physical components of a group of blades
    
• Sun N1 System Management
  The N1 Provisioning Server 3.0 Blades Edition from Sun dramatically lowers total cost of ownership. At the chassis level, Sun's N1 System Management will simplify initial setup, configuration, and deployment of blades. With multiple shelves (rack level), the Administrator can deploy applications, provision blades, and aggregate firmware and software updates.