Sun ignites blades market with dramatic revenue and customer growth across the Middle East

Sun Blade systems growth hit a high note with customers from across the Middle East region, with more than 40 enterprise customers ranging from diverse industries such as regional telecoms, financial services, energy and utilities, media, education, telecommunications, government and Web 2.0, have deployed the technology.

Sun has taken a leading role in their phenomenal growth by introducing 29 new blade products in less than two years.

Since re-entering the blades market in mid-2006, Sun tied for #4 in blade server market share for factory revenue (Q3CY07), released 29 new blade and supporting products, reflecting the value of a complete, truly differentiated blade portfolio spanning UltraSPARC(R), AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processor technologies.

Sun also recently announced its Sun Blade X8450 server module, bringing the energy-efficient performance of Quad-Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) processors to the Sun Blade 8000 family.

"Sun's momentum in the regions blade server market is a testament to our innovative systems design, which leads to extreme blade performance and efficiency," said Basil Ayass, Systems Practice Manager, Sun Microsystems MENA.

"We have witnessed a strong demand for Sun Blade systems in the region and our customers' feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. They are not only pleased with our ability to support multiple processor architectures and operating systems -- including UltraSPARC(R), Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron, Solaris(TM), Linux, Windows & VMware -- but also with the complete package Sun can provide -- servers, storage and software, backed by Sun services."

Blade servers reached an important milestone in the third quarter of 2007 when, according to the IDC worldwide quarterly server tracker, they represented more than 10% of all servers shipped worldwide, and revenue from blade servers topped $1bn for the first time in a single quarter.

The lineup of blade servers from Sun Microsystems easily exemplifies why enterprise datacenters worldwide are adopting blades so quickly.

Their high-density, compact modular format enables blade servers to simplify datacenter topology, ease resource management and help IT departments deliver services faster, more reliably and more flexibly than they can with rack-mounted or pedestal servers.

Sun has reached other product and industry milestones in its blades portfolio, including development and commercial availability of 29 new blade products, including eight blade server modules, four chassis, and 17 I/O products.

Sun also launched its Sun Blade Modular Solution portfolio -- a new online portal that enables customers and solution partners to view, plan and gain support on a number of leading ISV applications for Sun Blade systems.

Sun boasts of thirty five record-breaking benchmarks with proven horizontal and vertical system scalability, as well as power efficiency, on diverse application workloads ranging from High Performance Computing (HPC) to virtualization to cryptography.