Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
I'll take a quick stab at this.
I don't know the specifics of your business, but what happens if you experience a sudden surge of growth? Say, your business guys manage to secure a massive round of financing, or you sign a big contract... or maybe your product starts selling exceptionally well. All of the sudden, you find your data set growing exponentially.
Sure, you upgrade the box. Now it's a giant 4-way PC with 4GB ram, and a 10-spindle disk array. That holds out for another a few weeks. But it's just not enough. Queries keep rolling in.. some of them never come back out. Strange things start happening.. the server begins to thrash day and night. But, there's more data!
Add another box? Okay, you begin to horizontally scale your environment. More PCs, more software licenses, more monitors, more people, more network infrastructure, and air conditioning (don't forget to call that contractor!), etc. Pretty soon, your costs start to spiral out of control. You have your people working 24/7 to distribute your database. If it weren't for the damned server instability...
More data. Lots of it. Hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes of data. Your sales VP drops by to ask why he can't access the database for the third time today. You know, we got 539 new customers this week. And, when were we rolling out that new web front end again?
(Excuse the drama.. :)
You give up. After spending ten times what it would have cost to do it right from the beginning, you start the long task of porting your applications and data to a Unix platform. Now you understand scalability.
Next lessons - availability, security, and support.
Side note for the /390 guys out there - isn't it ironic to hear these arguments from a Unix user? :)
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
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
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).
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?