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I did this recently as well. Had a look at a few commercial NAS systems, and almost bought this one: http://www.newisys.com/products/na-1400.html, but then decided to build my own.

It wasn't hard, but you need to be careful which M/B you chose. My first attempt with a Gigabyte integrated board had some odd USB/SATA RAID problems that meant I had to disable USB to get SATA working and even then, performance was poor. I switched to a Biostar board and the problems went away. Drives are WD 500GB RAID edition, and have been performing well, and seem reasonably cool. I'm using SME server as the OS of choice, so it does a bit more than a straight NAS, but is still simple enough to run headless and be configurable by non-techie people.

Except the fact that most Opteron based Sun machines were designed by Newisys.

Look at these pictures:
Sun V40z
Newisys 4300

Newisys was one of the first places to design Opteron based systems.

Why invest in an all new line using it's own developed Sun hardware based on AMD Opteron chips?

From what i've read, Sun's Opteron line is just rebranded Newisys servers.

If you don't care about Sun's support, you can buy the same chassis from the designers, Newisys. Sun didn't design these Opteron systems themselves! A UK-based reseller of Newisys hardware is Rainbow-IT. Never used 'em, just found 'em when I was googling a while back.

Not that that is a bad thing, but I cannot see any difference between the V40z and this.

So, apart from Dell, and Compaq(HP), who is there for x86/amd64 servers?

See Newisys pronounced like "New Isis." There are a lot of former HP, and former companies-acquired-by-HP, employees working there. They make top notch stuff and do real R&D on bleeding-edge tech. Sun seems to OEM their AMD64 stuff too.

No I don't work for them, just know people who do.

At first I didn't think that you quoted the whole sentence, but you did. It starts with "For example,". It never says that they used a PC. Plus, I don't know of any computer that can survive outside of a server room that money can buy that has peripherals faster than what you can get on a PC. Plus, assuming that the data that was transfered from some kind of storage device (it may very well have been cached into RAM first, or even done in parallel from more than one computer), I don't know of any storage device that can handle anything near 7.5Gbps (7.5*1024/8 = 960 MBs). The fastest storage I know of is fibre channel that can sustain 400 MBs.

This is a pretty impressive feat that is pushing the envelope of all existing computer and networking hardware.

Also, at the end of the article it says:

The technology used in setting this record included S2io's Xframe 10 GbE server adapter, Cisco 7600 Series Routers, Newisys 4300 servers using AMD Opteron processors, Itanium servers and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003.

The AMD servers specs can be found here. I don't know if you consider that a "PC" or not. The best offerings in the Itanium department is from HP, and you can look at those guys here. Again, I don't know if you conder those a PC or not, but at least at the lower end of the Itanium family they use the same PCI architecture that PCs use.

With respect to the memory, at least this box has 32 GB of memory and 4-way Opteron. I know, still no where near the big iron, but very respectable at the price points OEMs are selling them for. Put Myrinet or Infiniband in these suckers for the money you save by not going Itanium, and you have a cluster configuration that scales really well.

Itanium is a fascinating architecture, but Intel *has* to do something about power consumption, cooling, and just plain cost before it can be a good competitor to other systems. The price difference between cooling, power, and the initial price and the competitors means competing configurations equally priced either have many many more nodes or a much better interconnect between nodes.

The only thing the article references is that Newisys is leading the charge, but I don't see anything I would consider a source. Racksaver is claiming that evaluation units are available now, but mostly there's just a lot of Opteron Server Evaluation signups. Does anyone have any real information? Cost? Non-evaluation release? Anything?

According to the spec sheet there is a "Dedicated Service Processor" which runs the management functions. I wonder what kind of chip they are using?

These guys are designing Opteron servers, including dual Opteron 1U servers (web and render farm goodness) and quad Opteron 3U servers. Very impressive specs. The management is dominated by senior IBMers, plus a senior marketing weasel from Dell. Hmm, Dell skipped the Itanic2...

Somehow, I suspect their designs are going to get licensed by some very big vendors. Call it a hunch.