Sun Microsystems' mainstream Niagara-blade approacheth.

The Register has discovered the presence of St. Paul. This blade server will run on Sun's current UltraSPARC T1 chip and fit into Sun's Opteron-based blade chassis. Officially, the server looks to be called the Sun Blade T6300.

The one-socket blade will have 8 DIMMs, 4 disks, 2 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet ports, 2 USB 2.0 ports and a service processor. The system then taps the power supplies, fans and I/O slots that are part of the blade chassis.

The box is set to ship in March.

(Thanks to Mr. Keyworth you know who for the heads up.)

Sun's UltraSPARC T1 - aka Niagara - chip has been one of the company's most pleasant surprises. Customers have been purchasing more than $100m worth of UltraSPARC T1-based servers per quarter.

The multi-core chip is best suited for web serving and other lightweight, multi-threaded software jobs.

Sun currently sells Netra blades with the UltraSPARC T1 inside for the telco market. ®