Sun Fire V40z: Four Opterons in a 3U
by Kristopher Kubicki on February 22, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Final Thoughts
Sun obviously gave us a lot of data to digest here. We took a look at a piece of hardware that truly has a few competitors; HP’s ProLiant DL585 seems to be the only remotely Tier 1 solution – and not surprisingly, pricing out a similar setup as the one that we tested today from Sun, which was well over $22,000. Second Tier competitors like ASA and Appro are able to provide solutions based on similar specifications, but even those readily approach $20,000 without half the management or PCI-X options. Furthermore, Sun provides the smallest implementation of any of these quad Opteron servers in a 3U form; the ProLiant DL585 comes in 4U form only. There are many more small differences between each server, but we took the time to illustrate the design wins and flaws of just the Sun Fire V40z in this analysis; HP and Appro will have to wait for another day.Sun has a speed daemon on their hands, and they know it. Sun was very quick to announce the next generation V40z (4 x Opteron 852, 8GB PC-3200) that set more than half a dozen performance records at LinuxWorld last week. With only a single server running on four of the 130nm Opterons in this review, it’s difficult for us to judge Sun’s performance on the market as a whole. However, the enthusiastic approach to Linux coupled with high quality design and management already assure that Sun has won the battle to most, without even raising a finger for benchmarks. In the world of High Power, High Availability computing, stability and features go much further than a 1% boost in performance.
As far as stability goes, we know that the Sun Fire V40z is certainly best of breed. Between the Motorola Service Processor, dedicated out-of-band management network, redundant 760W power supplies and hot swappable active cooling, it becomes real hard for us to determine a single point of failure that could cripple a server. The seven featured PCI-X expansion slots are also a great addition to the feature portfolio of the V40z, even if Sun (and we) recommend that the seventh PCI adaptor goes unused.
Things are just starting to get really interesting at Sun, and at AMD. Sun’s Galaxy 8-way Opteron servers will soon be upon us, but in the meantime, we are already hearing about V40z configurations with dual core Opterons. Obviously, a dual core V40z – which is already dual core ready – will give Sun the only 3U, 8-way Opteron that we’ve heard of. Between dual core Opterons and continual improvements on the 90nm Opteron steppings, server administrators have a lot to look forward to this year.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
38 Comments
View All Comments
tironside - Thursday, February 24, 2005 - link
I agree with dwnwrd. the lom part of it is not great for remote console etc. the lom that the hp stuff has is pretty slick, with a java / web interface. The other main problem I have with this is it offers only raid 1 unless you buy a rather expensive add on card to do raid 5, kind of a teaser to put 6 drive bays and only let you do raid 1... It's a good start, but sun needs to make some changes before it can go mission critical. (raid and lom enhancements imho) while I like cli stuff, trying to get junior people to do complicated cli stuff is dangerous...dwnwrd - Thursday, February 24, 2005 - link
I have some V20s and a V40. The service processor is pretty great except if you try to direct the Linux serial console to it then connect to the "serial over LAN" you'll get a flood of "serial8250: too much work for irq4" and a sleepy system.http://supportforum.sun.com/hardware/index.php?t=m...
Pontius - Thursday, February 24, 2005 - link
I am curious what they are using when they benchmark the linux kernel compile times. They use the time command which spits out three times - real, user & sys. Are they using the sum of all these? If not, something is wrong. Because I did the same test, on the same 2.6.4 kernel using -j2 on a dual 2.8GHz Nocona system and I got a "real" time of 147s. That doesn't seem right because the Opterons are way faster at compilation. On the other hand, if I take the sum of the 3 times, I get 420s. Any thoughts?jlee123 - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
RedHat 9, are you joking!!?? This has got to be a mistake, I can't understand how Sun could be shipping a 64-bit server with a 32-bit OS that's reached End Of Life. It's the equivalent of buying a workstation with Windows ME on it. Also, there was never a official port of RH9 to x86-64, the first x86-64 RedHat was RHEL3, the Fedora team later released FC1 x86-64. If Sun doesn't wish to pay licensing, they'd be better off shipping with FC2, FC3 or CentOS, a free rebuild of RHEL. This hardware isn't even going to begin to be utilized till it's running something more modern like RHEL4 x86-64.JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
I could think of one use for these. :)http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.aspx?catid=...
lauwersw - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
Standard rule for parallel make is to use 2xnumber of processors available. This gives most optimal results to hide disk latencies and seems to be correct in most cases I've seen.phaxmohdem - Wednesday, February 23, 2005 - link
Call me what you will, but I would like to see some quad/dual Xeon scores to compare to as well (along with price tages for comparison :) )And yes, If I were a rich man who knew what to do with that much computing power, I would have a dozen of these babies in my basement! Who needs women anymore once you have 48 Opteron x50 or x52 cpus humming at your disposal. And drool core? Ahhhhhhhhhhh.
JustAnAverageGuy - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
That thing is a BEAST.I have no idea what I'd do with a computer like that.
MrEMan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Kristopher,Thanks for the clarification about the reduced media tag.
E
KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
RyanVM: The system used 850s.Kristopher