Sun, which lost some traction selling x86 servers when AMD flubbed the Barcelona – and had to run hurry up and pull some Intel quad-based machines together last year – finally got to announce its first AMD quad machines this week in the shadow of HP and Dell.

Eight of them, rack-mount and blade systems, including the new two-socket 1U Sun Fire X4140 and the 2U, very Web 2.0, Sun Fire X4240, and the industry’s only 2U four-socket Barcelona-based server, the Sun Fire X4440.

Sun said it concentrated on power and cooling and capacity and the servers are heavy on memory and storage.

The 4140 and 4240 are good up to 64GB of memory, with the first holding eight drives and the second 16. Sun fancies them a “mini-storage systems” for database, HPC and BI/data warehouse applications that need online storage or simply storage servers in open storage infrastructures.

The 4440 will take 128GB of memory and eight drives.

The existing Sun Fire X2200 M2, X4100 M2 and X4200 M2 are available with Barcelona too. Sun expects the 4100 M2 and 4200 M2 to start ramping down in a little while.

The AMD chip can also update the Sun Blade X8440 and Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers. The latter won’t be available until the end of June. The 4U 4600 is a 32-way eight-socket beast expected initially with 256GB of memory going to 512.

Sun points out that the 4440 and the 4600 squeeze into half the space of comparably outfitted systems.

The boxes, particularly the 4600 M2 and 8440 blade, are directed straight at virtualization and will be sold with VMware as well as Solaris, Linux and Windows.

The new boxes start at $2,545, with the 4600 starting at $14,126. They can be taken for a test run under Sun’s Try and Buy scheme.