HP just announced their Blades for Virtualization, and I blogged about their announcement.

But, I noticed they focused on comparing to Dell and IBM. Suspecting HP avoided a comparison to Sun, I asked some people at Sun how their products compare to HP's BL495c.

BL495c ships 16 DIMMS. Oh, Sun shipped this feature in the X6220 & X6250 July 2007. Sun's memory is 64 GB vs. HP's max of 128 GB.
BL495c ships with 10GbE. On Sun, 10 GbE is an option.
BL495c has SSD. Sun currently doesn't have SSD as an option.

So, if you need 16 DIMMS for 128 GB of memory, 10 GbE, and SSD, the HP BL495c is the only blade out there. If don't need that much memory, or SSD, then the Sun X6220\X6250 may be another alternative for your virtualization solution.

In less than 6 months, Dell and IBM will have their latest wares. Good news for virtualization solutions there are more choices for addressing IO issues with more RAM, storage, and NIC capacity.

One alternative you may want to evaluate instead of SSD is Virident's flash memory solution given 16 DIMMs.

Virident Systems has developed the first data-centric technology platform to deliver a new class of green memory solutions for the data center. This low-energy, high-performance platform solution enables Internet data centers to cost-effectively keep pace with the rising performance and energy demands of Internet-Scale. Underlying this platform is the GreenGateway™ technology conceived and developed by Virident. Spansion® EcoRAM is the first memory product built on this platform.