Sun Microsystems just released their newest server systems, and they once again look totally kick-ass. In particlar, the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System sorta rocks my world. I’m just thinking — Harvard Law School has seven racks of servers. I’ll bet using this system you could easily fit it into one. One 19u Blade 8000, fully loaded, gives you something like 40 processors and 80GB of RAM with six redundant power supplies, gobs of expansion bays thanks to the really unique design, and tons of gigabit ethernet ports. Fill the rest of the rack with Sun’s storage servers and we’re talking terabytes, we’re talking as many virtualized servers as you could possibly need and storaged sliced however you want it with the ZFS file system and ultimate flexibility with power usage that is pretty darn reasonable. Why spend all this money buildling out a new data center and buying more cooling and bringing in new machines and racks when you can take your whole operation and boil it down to 42u?

Cut your UPS load and apply that $50k previously budgeted to HVAC and consolidate to one rack and throw out sixty machines? The economics are changing.