Sun Microsystems has continued to draw the focus away from the IBM buyout rumours but this time by joining the other major companies in releasing a new line of products featuring the new Intel Nehalem chips.
Yesterday it announced new servers, integrated open storage and high-performance networking.
John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's systems group, said: "Today, Sun is taking integrated compute, software, networking and storage to the next level and our innovations are giving HPC customers the speed, scalability and simplicity to help solve the world's greatest challenges."
Sun has combined the new dual-node Sun Blade X6275 server module, powered by the Intel Xeon 5500 series, with the new Sun Blade 6048 InfiniBand Quad Data Rate Network Express Module, the Sun Blade 6048 chassis, the Sun Cooling Door system, the Lustre file system and Sun's Open Storage portfolio.
On top of this it announced that its Sun Blade server nodes can be specified to run a variety of operating systems including Linux, Windows, Solaris and OpenSolaris.
In addition to the new blade servers, Sun also launched a range of rack servers and workstations powered by the Xeon 5500.
A spokesperson from Sun said: "The HPC networking solutions announced today help to maximise performance with an integrated signalling and switching approach that uses the latest available technology to optimise per-node performance and system-wide scaling for application communications and I/O."
"Using these solutions, customers can dramatically simplify their environment from less highly integrated solutions - reducing cabling by 84 per cent, switches by 97 per cent, and rack space by 75 per cent."
Large institutions such as the Australian National University and the University of Zurich have already signed up to use the new range.
