Queries the following Comparison is trying to Answer:
- HP Blades ( BL460c & BL465c & BL480c & BL680c & BL685c ) VS SUN Blades ( X6200 & T6300 & X6400 & X8400)
- HP C-Class VS SUN Blade 6000 & SUN Blade 8000
- How does HP Blades compare to SUN Blades?
- Advantages & Disadvantages of SUN & HP Chassis & Blades
- What is better SUN Blades or HP Blades? How?
- Independent Unbiased Comparison SUN Blades & HP Blades
SUN Blades VS HP Blades Introduction:
If you have reached this page you are more probably already decided on using Blades, but still can’t solve the puzzle of which Vendor to go with. As many vendors are highly competing to your blade purchase we had put many blades comparison on our site. In this Comparison we are comparing HP C-Class Chassis & SUN Blades 6000 & 8000 from an independent point of view.
| HP Blades | SUN Blades | |
| Chassis flexibility | BladeSystem c-Class, BladeSystem p-Class, bh 5700 ATCA | SUN Blade 6000 SUN Blade 8000 |
| ITComparison Team CommentsHP Blades vs SUN Blades | HP has only one chassis being offered at the moment for enterprise customers which is the C-Class Chassis, where SUN offer two different Chassis SUN Blade 6000 & SUN Blade 8000. Both SUN & HP have no compatibilities across their chassis. You can’t use modules & Blades across SUN 6000 & SUN 8000, as well you can’t use Blades & Modules from HP older chassis into their C-class chassis. | |
| Blade server flexibility | Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron, Intel Itanium® | Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron, SPARC |
| ITComparison Team Comments | Both HP & SUN are offering AMD & Intel Blades. In the Unix side HP Offer Intel Itanium Blades & SUN Offer SPARC Blades. So you can almost call it a tie on this one. | |
| Blades/Chassis Full Height Blades/Chassis Fully Redundant Blades/Chassis Blades w/ hotswap HDD per chassis Fully Redundant Blades w/ hotswap HDD | 16 8 0 16 0 | 10 10 0 10 0 |
| ITComparison Team Comments SUN Blades vs HP Blades | It seems SUN has only succeeded in fitting 10 Blades in 10 U chassis which makes it lower Density than HP Chassis if you use a half height blade. We call SUN & HP Full Height Blades semi-redundant blades as they are not fully redundant as explained under the redundancy comparison.- SUN Density is very low for a blade solution as they are not doing any better than 1U servers. Fitting 10 Blades in 10 U enclosure that is 1U per Blade which could be easily matched with rack mounted servers. | |
| Redundancy | – Single power connections to each blade – Single I/O paths for Certain I/O slots on most of their blades | – Single power connections to each blade – Single I/O paths for Certain I/O slots on most of their blades |
| ITComparison Team Comments | Both HP & SUN seems to miss the same redundancy points in their design. | |
| Hot Swap HDD Solid State Drives (SSD) | No need for expansion unit which save space Not Available | No need for expansion unit which save space Not Available |
| ITComparison Team Comments | Both SUN & HP does not require an expansion to fit hotswap HDDs, further more both does not offer solid stat drives yet. | |
| Illuminated path to blade components | HP offer diagnostics LEDs beside some components, but will not led without power. | Sun does not offer any equivalent. |
| ITComparison Team Comments | Better and faster serviceability in the HP Blades with the ability to pinpoint the problem using diagnostics LEDs, which is not offered at all by SUN. Though it would be nice if HP had a backup battery in its blade to get the LEDs to work when taken out for maintenance. | |
| Event identification | Nothing Equivelent. | Nothing Equivalent |
| ITComparison Team Comments | Neither HP nor SUN offer Event identification system which would provide a better non over-lapping error reporting through their Management solution which help in resolving cascaded problems faster. | |
| Connectivity | HP Offer internal switches in addition to their pass-thrus offering for most kind of connectivity available in the market today (Ethernet, Fiber Channel, 10GB Ethernet , and InfiniBand). As well they offer it from multiple vendors for some connectivity type. | Sun only offer Pass-thru modules for all connectivity types, no internal switches at all. |
| ITComparison Team Comments SUN Blades vs HP Blades | SUN fail to integrate any switches into their offering, which make their blades offering not any better than 1U servers offering. As they are already packaging 10 blades in 10U Chassis, so no space saving. Further more, they force you to use further space for external switches. In addition, you don’t get rid of all the nasty network & Fiber cables between the chassis & the switches.In the other hand, HP Blades can fit up to 16 Blades in 10 U Chassis which save you on space. Further more they allow you to fit all your required switches in the chassis saving you further on space & cabling. It even look a lot smoother when getting rid of the 100’s of cables connecting the servers to the switches in the case of 1Us server & SUN Blades.Important note: That HP offering for some connectivity switches are only unmanaged (e.g: Inifiniband), though that still a lot better than not offering it at all. | |
| Blade deployment and redeployment | Virtual Connect | No Equivelant |
| ITComparison Team Comments SUN Blades vs HP Blades | Virtual Connect provide automatic failover for failing blade to another blade using boot from SAN functionality. In addition, it removes all the work involved in replacing a failing blade.SUN Does not offer anything equivalent to HP Virtual Connect & will require the admin to reconfigure the SAN Zoning & the network VLANs when replacing any blade wasting precious time & increase the downtime required to replace a blade.Note: HP requires special proprietary SAN & Network switches in order for their Virtual Connect, but they still beat SUN on this one as SUN don’t have equivalent at all. | |
| Built-in Central Management Module | Almost | N/A |
| ITComparison Team CommentsHP Blades vs SUN Blades | HP management module offers monitoring capabilities of chassis & Blades, but most management of the blades are done directly to each blade using their ILO 2 chip installed on each blade.SUN Blades does not offer any equivalent to HP Management Module. They only offer direct server management, which in turn means you still have to manage your blades as a normal rack server, not as a blade infrastructure. | |
| Efficient utilization of available power resources | HP Power Regulator | N/A |
| ITComparison Team Comments HP Blades vs SUN Blades | HP power Regulator software are able to monitor the power per blade, per chassis, & per module.HP Power Regulator can integrate with third party monitoring tools.HP Power management can cap power usage based on trend data.SUN has no equivalent offering at the moment. | |
| Unpacking Offering | Assembled at customer site (Default) Fully Installed (Charge apply) Fully Installed + third party apps installed (Charge Apply) | Assembled at customer site (Default) Fully Installed (Charge apply)N/A |
| ITComparison Team Comments | Both HP & SUN Ship their blades systems to be assembled on the customer site. | |
| Investment Protection | Each Chassis is a fully different game. | Each Chassis is a fully different game. |
| ITComparison Team Comments | Both SUN & HP Chassis have no interopobility with their earlier offering. When upgrading between HP or SUN chassis you would have to get rid of your old blades & modules & replace them with new compatible ones, which can be a huge waste of investment. In addition, both vendors have no word on if that is going to hold for their next offering. | |
Other Related Comparisons:
- IBM Blade Server vs HP Blade Server
- IBM Blade Server vs Dell Blade Server
- IBM Blade Server vs SUN Blade Server
- Dell Blade Server vs SUN Blade Server
Category: Hardware