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New Machines From Sun
Another reader, nameless for his or her own protection, writes with more Sun hardware information: "Sun / Cobalt announced their new XTR machine ... I know a bit about it from their beta but couldn't say anything due to non-disclosure until they announced it.
It's not an AMD chip as has been reported, it uses Intel Coppermine P3's running up to 933 Mhz (or at least that's the highest they offer right now). Apparently the P3 was picked for lower heat/power consumption and so that they can do SMP in the near future. The unit we saw had a 2nd socket for SMP but the BIOS and software is not ready for it for this release. I'm guessing in another 6 months or so they'll release an SMP version.
This unit also had standard IDE drives in the 4 (yep, 4 all available in the front) hotswap bays but the sleds and backplane look like their considering SCA SCSI drives in the future, all they need to do is swap the controller card and drives and everything is ready since the controller is no longer built-in to the motherboard and the backplane has SCA connectors (the sled adapts the IDE drive to an SCA connector)."
That X1, besides giving you a rack-mounted 400MHz UltraSPARC for your under-a-grand, has what I think is the largest silkscreened logo I've ever seen on a computer. Why don't they just admit they want to and start hiring graphic artists from skateboard companies?
Seems like that acquisition of Cobalt Networks is bearing some fruit.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Clustering is a much better way to scale than SMP. Also, with clusters, you are better off with central shared storage than with having it on each one. There's no reason for your web servers to have good storage capabilities - its just a waste of money. Leave that to the NFS server.
Engineering and the Ultimate
The BEST 1U Linux boxes are the VA Linux servers. They really rock (actually, we use the 2U version, but I'm pretty sure the 1U is almost the same, just a little pricier). Anyway, VA Linux has the _best_ intel Linux hardware around. VERY well-tested, and VERY solid.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Isn't that an oxymoron? Of all the firewall products I've ever had the, errr, pleasure to work on, Firewall-1 is the least advanced, most unpleasant. The ipfilter module for Solaris is just as functional and at least it's open-sourced.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Cobolt isn't competing with this. This doesn't just "work" out of the box. You still need a Sysadmin to configure it and stuff.
Engineering and the Ultimate
I've used a Dell server. I have some queries that run for several hours. It seems that we either GBs of memory, or disk sub-system that is faster than the current SCSI RAID. Why would I want to go for expensive Sun equipment when I seem to get better value with x86 hardware? Besides, we'd have to take quite a hit moving everything from SQL Server to a non-MSFT DB solution.
As a Sun Sysadmin, I see only 2 problems that keep this box from UTTERLY blowing away the competition.
1) The drives are non SCSI, so in sun land, you can't mirror the hard drives [1]
2) (Follows from 1) The drives don't hot swap.
Sun has long lagged behind Compaq (the intel servers I see most at my work) and probably others in shipping with RAID chips that can cover the 2-5 hot swap, SCSI drives that can go in the chassie. Now I understand charging serious cash for external storage, but for the root drives, lay off.
[1] Note: if there is a way around this, I would LOVE to hear it, but every where I've seen, unless you have 2 different IDE busses, you can't mirror root drives.
Zapman
Check these 1U Linux boxes out: www.interpromicro.com
We have bought several of these for production use, and so far they are very nice. Starting at just $859.00 they are cheap, small, and all round just pretty nifty.
If you are paying $16K a pop for a Netra T1 105, you are on crack. A T1 with a 360/1MB cache and 128MB is ~$3200. Make it a 440/2MB and the price climbs all the way up to ~$5200. Single discs, no cdrom.
The RAM _is_ silly expensive, but even maxed out with two drives and 512MB, we still get them for less than $7000.
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
We ordered a Sun Blade when it came out, back in November. We still haven't seen it yet. Sun keeps claiming that it will ship Real Soon Now(tm).
We have one in our firm - 2X750MHz, 2GB RAM, 2X36GB 10k RPM FCAL disks, two Sun 17 inch (I think) flat panels - but we do buy quite a bit of Sun kit. The faceplate lights up, which is sort of cool. A guy who looks after some of our Starfires has it under his desk, and I went on a pilgrimage to his desk to see it back in mid-December.
No, it won't have the same problem. The cpus that cause the problems are 400MHz/4MB E-cache and the 440MHz/8MB E-cache. (Other may be affected such as the 480s, but I am not sure.)
Those cpus have problems because the cache is, apparently, not ECC. Sun's 'fix' is to clear the cache every Nns. Not really a fix, but at least the box doesn't fall over.
Looking at the specs for the new X1s, the cache has been reduced to 256KB, and although it isn't stated, the cache is likely on the die.
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
Its great for a cluster server or a single-service server (DNS/SQUID/firewall/load-balancer)
Engineering and the Ultimate
I don't know if Solaris has this, but with Linux you can just do a network install. You don't even need a floppy, you can just tftp the kernel image.
Engineering and the Ultimate
http://www.ultralinux.org/ for starters, but you can bag it from SuSE: http://www.suse.com
Seems odd that the product lines have crossed. $1000 for a Sparc server and $4800 for a Cobalt? If someone tried to pull that one on me a year ago I would have laughed in their faces.
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WWhhaatt ddooeess dduupplleexx mmeeaann??
This sig intentionally left justified.
The 220R is much different from the E250 (which, btw, is rackmountable). Yes, both support two CPUs. Yes, both support 2GB of RAM. Yes, both are PCI. But the 220R is 4U and holds two internal SCSI disks. The E250 is 6U and holds 6.
Ditto for the 420R/E450. The 420R is essentially the same as the 220R, except that it supports 4 CPUs and 4GB of RAM. The E450 is the same, except that it supports up to 20 internal SCSI disks.
As for the X1, it supports more than just one drive and 128MB of RAM. The base model just comes configured that way. The X1 would make a more-than-adquate web/name/mail server most businesses. Yes, what a suprise that you DON'T need a 800Mhz chip to run these services. Or even multiple chips.
For accessing a single disk, IDE is usually just as fast as SCSI.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Many n-tier system architectures use machines that are almost pure CPUs connected to networks. The machine would receive a request from a client application on the tier "above", make it's own requests for data from servers on the tier "below", perform some processing and then send a reply upwards and logging information down. You only really need a disk in these things for convenience sake, if they've been properly configured they won't even need to hit the pagefile during normal operation. You'd have real servers for your data storage, and you would be able to hot swap and/or add entire nodes to the system whenever you felt like it, because as long as they complete whatever they're working on before you disconnect them, they have no state on them at all. Very scalable, very easy to maintain, and quite cheap.
Sure it'd make a cheap singe server, but at that price the whole damn thing is practically disposable. Stuff a rack with them, hook 'em up to a SAN, or an NFS mounted data repository (to eliminate the need to replicate data) and front the whole thing with a nice load balancer (or 2 boxes running the Linux Director stuff). Voila - you've got a $50k rack with enough SSL encrypting, HTML pushing, PERL punching, and bandwidth blasting power to rival ANY $150k piece of 'big iron'.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
This is just a pity to see they preferred to put an IDE disc in this box.
OK, for monothreading apps, IDE is okay and can even be fast enough but it relies in some way on the processor's power.
Why not putting some SCSI disc(s) inside, hmmmm ?
BTW, I love the idea of a service processor in this low-cost device: this will save much space in my machine rooms.
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
$75 is cheap. There's a catch though...the licence doesn't include upgrades. So, if an exploit or other defect is discovered and fixed, you need to;
If there's a way to get updates that I don't know about, feel free to hit me with a Clue Stick(tm).
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Not really *that* special :) but it is pretty sweet hardware.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
And why, pray tell, would you want to waste space on a video board in something that is meant to be crammed into a single rack with 10 other thin servers like it? This isn't a desktop system -- it's supposed to be something you throw a rack & forget about where it is physically.
From the article: "... it employs standard PC components, including PC memory and IDE disk drives...." I assume that means it takes standard RAM.
Close -- it has a single network card. But, that built-in card is dual ported, each port having 10/100 capability.
--Mid
or DHCP servers or routers. They are nice and small and at these prices, you can use individual boxes dedicated to each of these functions and have replacement boxes ready to go.
*OUCH!* Thanks...I think!
Sun should make it easy to find these kind of things. Only a few sites are harder to deal with, and almost all of them high-profile.
[GRIPE] Why hide every patch and upgrade under a layer of menus that use phrases from a marketing handbook, as opposed to...well...an FTP site? What's so hard about that old favorite, plus a simple directory structure?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The Register is reporting that the UK list price for the X1 is going to be £1200 - almost double the straight currency conversion of £679 (US$1000 == GBP£679 at the moment, according to this site.
WTF is that all about then?
I noted that Apple UK's pricing of the Titanium Powerbook is only marginally above the straight conversion, which sounds fair to me. But almost double?
...j
I'm with ya there. I had to reread their page a few times before I let myself believe. I was waiting to see *disk/cpu not included or something.
After reading the specs though, I'm totally in awe. What it really means to me is that I can finally have a decent (rackmount!) sparc box at home (for cheaper than a PC!). Yes!
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All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Keep in mind that this dont mean anything. Intel chips outperform SPARCS mhz for mhz in all the important benchmarks.
As a Mac user (multiple) smarting from the stupid MHz comments in the press, I'm surprised that they didn't put a 2GHz clock on the bastard (and step it down 5:1 at the chip, which would give them an ultra-precise 400 MHz clock.)
I'd have some real decisions to make if I hadn't already budgeted for a Titanium PowerBook.
But the next rack unit I buy...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I realize that slashdot is a Linux site, but why would you want to run something other than Solaris on a MODERN sun box?
Solaris is a very good operating system, and I have found it more suitable for the databases and programs that I work with. (No, I am not interested in Postgre or mySQL, don't flame please)
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Seriously... There are a lot of small development companies out there, especially those building ASP/Netapps, who don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to lay out on Sparc boxes for their QA and development work.
I wonder what these are going to do to the countless leasing companies that are reaming small shops for a good $14-16k (low-end) Ultra2 boxes...
- A.P.
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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Simple.
You have a jumpstart server around to jumpstart it. But of course you shouldn't need this, because the install does *not* require a GUI. If it detects no framebuffer it defaults to the text only install option, throughout.
--- I do not moderate.
Well it is "FrameBuffer, Audio, SCSI" not included. Not that FrameBuffer has any value for a rackmount server, Audio has almost none, and SCSI, well, that would be nice, but I guess they have to cut the cost some how. NEBS would be nice as well, but again...
The drawback is no PCI slot. So there are a lot of things you can't use it for. Beyond memory and disk space there is basically no expansion at all. No gigabit ethernet. No RAID. None of that. A pity. But there are other Netras.
I hope BSD/OS runs on it :-)
Does anyone have a "Thousand dollar review" for this thing yet - or do we have to wait for Chris Chabot/redir to rip something off?
Misleading? I was comparing size. The E220/420 use the same chassis. That chassis IS smaller than both the 250 (by 2U) and the 450 (by alot).
Even so, the 450 is still a waste of space. A 420R configured with 2 external D1000 units takes up less verticle space and affords you more hard drive slots than the 450, and can carry the same amount of CPUs and RAM. One might argue that this kind of set up is more redundant in some ways.
Sun has been selling new Sun Ultra 5s 10s and higher off of E-Bay sience Augest. YOu can get a Ultra 5 for around $2000 and a Ultra 10 for around $3000 It is still a little more expensive then a x86 but runing and Ultra Sparc is a nice experence.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This throws a lot of stuff out the window. I'm completely blown away that Sun have done this.
:)
Say you're putting together a hosting provider or other such consumer of rackmounted gear. Go to your boss and suggest you either buy:
a, VALinux 1120's for $1400 each.
b, BSDi 1210's for $1300 each.
c, 'Proper' sun boxes for $1000 each.
No brainer, particularly with Sun's excellent reputation.
And before you start flaming away, consider what this does to 1U dell boxes running win2k server... like, two and a half grand? BWaaaahahahahahaaa! Fuck you Bill!
They're going to sell millions of these things. And do not, for one second, underestimate the good this is going to do Unix.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Solaris 8 is free (beer) for up to and including 8 CPUs though they charge $75 for the media package (several CDROMs)..
(check here for details)
Your Working Boy,
Yes, I have. They still fall behind. On the other hand the hardware almost never fails, is a lot simpler to "fix" remotly (tell it to boot off of another drive, or boot of of CD and reload the OS, or just power down and back up). They are also much simpler to get in the same config for more then 3 months in a row.
Even real fixing is frequently simpler. SCA drives are wonderful (and yes, you can get SCA PCs, but once you configure a SCA PC the price tends to go above Suns!)
That is why we use them for servers a lot. A lot lot. A very very lot. Even with the CPU gap.
someone can confirm that the Sparc port of Linux will run on this, I will be getting out my credit cards. This looks really sweet.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
That X1, besides giving you a rack-mounted 400MHz UltraSPARC for your under-a-grand, has what I think is the largest silkscreened logo I've ever seen on a computer. Why don't they just admit they want to and start hiring graphic artists from skateboard companies?
Why not actually use the X1 as a skateboard deck? put a few little wheels on it and Whamo! Instant Geek/Board culture cross. I could see these things really catching on at lunch hour in the industrial parks. Then you could really start making sparks with that sparc.
air and light and time and space
You might want to read the story again; the Sun X1 holds 2 drives, and the Cobalt RaQ XTR holds 4 drives.
I am one of SuSE's SPARC/Linux developers. Currently, I don't think Linux will run on one of those machines. If you look at their Product White Paper, you'll see (from the description and pictures) that the machine has both an UltraSPARC-IIe processor and an ALi PCI chipset. The US-IIe, while probably easy to add support for, just isn't known to the kernel currently. The ALi PCI chipset is a new thing for SPARC machines. Also, the machine has USB ports that the SPARC/Linux port won't currently take advantage of. Support will, of course, be worked on... just have patience. :)
http://www.xcomputing.com - has a variety of 1U Intel machines, great prices, very fast delivery. I have a couple in my basement. http://www.aslab.com also looks like they have nice stuff but I haven't bought any from them (yet).
Terminal
- or -
Linux+Minicom+Rollover cable
- or -
Terminal Server (Computone, Cisco, Lightwave Comm)...
They all work fine with Netras... the T1 models have LOM, which is nice if the boxes are remote, because you can telnet to your terminal server on the correct port for the serial console (Netra serial port A) and type "poweron" to power them up, then get a console Login or OpenBoot.
The T1 105s are good boxes; just slightly lesser than the T1 AC200 (same box with 440 MHz cpu and only up to a gb of RAM). Get them before they are gone; that might be a very good deal. They are not a bad box to run Linux on either...
Sean
The thing about Sun equipment is that, yeah, it's overpriced. But it offers something that not a lot of other vendors can offer in terms of hardware quality. The parts used by Sun are generally of very high quality (and I'm talking the stupid, but important stuff, like cables, power supplies, and PCBs). Sun hardware, while never being a shining star in the CPU department, makes up for it in I/O throughput, if those type of apps are your deal (though CPU intensive stuff is best left to CPUs like IA32/Alpha).
The Netra T1 boxes (at least the 105s, and I assume the 220s) run Linux, have lights-out managment of power via dial-in or terminal server, and come standard with 10kRPM disks, and have dual ethernet, and have plenty of expansion (via the E1 box for 4 extra PCI cards, if you need it).
Overall, the netras might be overpriced, but they are a good choice for folks that have the money (and the people) to use them in the right situation.
I shoulda known someone much better than I'll ever be would read that, and post.
Thanks for the correction. I don't want to mislead people. Guess I shoulda checked the hardware compatibility list for the components, and not just the CPU.
mea culpa.
220/420
17.8 cm H
44.9 cm W
69.6 cm D
250
51.7 cm H
26.2 cm W
73.2 cm D
450
58.1 cm H
44.8 cm W
69.6 cm D
I work at a company who uses lots of the Netra machines, and they're awesome. The Netra 220R is the same as an Ultra Enterprise 250 only rackmountable and the Netra 420R is the same as a Ultra Enterprise 450 only again, it's rack mountable.
The question I have is who is going to use a machine with an IDE drive an only 128 megs of RAM in a production environment? Normal users probably won't use it since it's only rack-mountable, and it's pretty low end to be a business server.
Thoughts?
We're building a suite of app servers in my (job) and have started looking into HP's new LPr's rumored to come out (dual PIII in 1U). Sun has made 1U machines for a while, but they've been expensive.
And sometimes I wonder if an 8-CPU 4U box may be a better deal over 4 1U boxes.... Still, having a rack stacked full on 1U machenes, some acting as firewalls, some as web servers, some as app servers, some as DB servers, etc... It's kind of sweet.
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting