Slashdot Mirror
Sun Announces New x86 Servers
An anonymous reader writes "Sun announced the new V60x and V65x servers (1U and 2U respectively). The 1U has 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs and the 2U has 3.06GHz Xeon CPUs. They also announced a partnership with RedHat and Oracle running on these boxes. RedHat will also start shipping Sun's Java with their distribution."
two of those CDs are source.
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
I've actually been looking at Sun's new entry level servers, the v210 and v240 servers.
The v210 starts at $2,995US, and the large configuration, with 2 1Ghz UltraSparc IIIi processors, 2GB of RAM, 2 36GB 10,000RPM SCSI-III drives, and 4 10/100/1000 network intarfaces comes in at $5,795US. I've seen comparible x86-based servers for more than that.
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
IBM's 1U Server
Sun's 1U Server
At least they are price competitive with IBM. I'm not too sure about Dell but it's a start.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
for the first time, apple to apple comparison shows sun cheaper than dell. i selected sun v65 and tried identical system at dell. dell doesn't give 3.06 GHz in 2U rack, so i selected 2.8 GHz. This is 600 cheaper. However, Dell charges $600 for upgrade from 2.6 to 2.8, so their upgrade from 2.8 to 3.06 would have been higher than 600 (upgrade from 2.4 to 2.6 is 200, 2.6 to 2.8 is 600). dell comes with customer installed RedHat Advanced Server while Sun comes with Solaris 9 and both are atleast comparable system (to be frank, RH profession is cheaper. but i am aware of several server apps which require RH AS patches and won't be certified on RH Pro).
I just read the fine print... Suns JVM will only ship on Red Hat's Enterprise Linux Product.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Be mindful that Red Hat attempts to provide an array of software and services to their customer base - this includes the mainstream (read: free) distribution that contains GPL (or near-equivalent license) software.
Otherwise, Red Hat produces other distributions (like Advanced Server and Enterprise Server) that might contain proprietary (read: not so free) code and software that may require additional licenses.
The spirit is in open-source - but customer wishes also pay the bills.
Ayup
While it is a very cool system... (incl. the 4 network interfaces), 1 GHz UltraSparc IIIis are slow, and they don't have the extra benefit of tons of cache compared to the regular US3. The RAM is only SDRAM (still), and 72GB of space is paltry.
So, if you absolutely need a SPARCv9 architecture rackmount, this is the way to go. But featurewise it falls short of say an Altus 140 from Penguin Computing, or even a 1000E if you want 64-bit. And Peng. Comp. is expensive as far as that kind of thing goes.
That being said, the small Enterprises are quite cool, but they aren't as cost effective. It helps if your organization has a pre-existing agreement, and can get you a break.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
I agree, it will even be a more compelling product once the 970 comes out and we see improved io with very large memory configurations.
I agree 100% as much as I love to see mature open source databases with enterprise featuers I got to admit that it is still not coming anytime soon.
IIRC 6-7 months ago a marketing person from Oracle came to our company to discuss if Oracle will be suitable for our next development project, our customer contracted us to develop an online electronic components database with over +20 Million component with all their information, spec sheets. In the first year the database is expected to reach 0.7TB.
I recall asking her that we plan to implement heavy server side logic in stored procedures, and she said "if it couldn't be done with Oracle then it can never be done", you get to love Oracle's marketing people but technically she was right.
The only ready-today open source database that comes near Oracle (actually it is equivalent to Oracle 7) is SAPDB and what drives me really nuts is that the open source community ignores it completely in favor for something like MySQL (not that something is wrong with MySQL).
You can get the source for java, it's at http://wwws.sun.com/software/download/technologies .html
Actually, I don't know if I agree with you about Sun not being worth the premium.
We run a very large web site that mainly consists of cheap Intel based hardware. But at the core of it all we've always used Sun servers with Solaris. Sure, the Sun servers have always cost us 10 times the price of comparable Intel hardware, but the Sun hardware comes with two things the Intel hardware does not:
1) The hardware (and the OS) is remarkably stable. One server ran for five years under heavy load the entire time without needing any maintenance. In the same time period we had to replace a lot of the Intel hardware.
2) In the unlikely event that something actually breaks, even if it's at 2AM in the morning, a guy comes rushing in and repairs the machine. The most amazing thing is that he always seems to have the right spare parts stored away, just in case. It's a fantastic service, and when you run a large scale, business critical operation, that kind of service is _extremely_ valuable.
And although this has nothing to do with hardware, there's (for me) an important point that concerns the OS too:
3) Even when upgrading the OS from 2.6 to 9, old software and strange old Apache modules (which we have to continue using, even though it's developer has stopped supporting them a long time ago) keeps working. I can't think of many Linux binaries from 1997 that would work for me out-of-the-box on a modern distribution today.
I'm not saying Intel hardware or Linux is bad, but I say that there are a few cases where the safety that overpriced Sun hardware can give you, gets more or less priceless.
Sun already outclasses PC hardware with their SPARC systems. Xeons plugged into Sun's NUMA systems would be interesting but redundant.
These servers address those parts of a customer's application that may not need those spiffy and expensive busses. It is good for Sun to adequately address this part of the business. They need to keep their big box customers from getting distracted when shopping Dell or IBM for pizzabox application servers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It depends. The 210/240 run Solaris for Sparc, which is a great OS. The internal system bandwidth is higher than the Dell and you get 4 Gbe NICs as standard, plus it'll go up to 8Gb of RAM.
Actually, I am seeing a number of folks either 1) migrate to or 2) seriously consider Apple's Xserve for purposes sort of in-between. The Xserve runs UNIX, it is absurdly easy to manage, they are cheap, and give pretty good performance especially when code is optimized for Altivec.
I've been on the lookout for this (and possibly webobjects uptake) and just haven't seen it... where I have seen xserve adoption has been in certain areas where macs would have been the preferred platform (ie, mac clients) but for many reasons they had to go with a higher-end unix or NT server as apple just didn't have much to offer for that market. There was a small market for people who wanted to use Apple servers but they just didn't meet their needs- so Apple saw a big spike in sales for them when they were released. Heck, some of these people use OS9 with webstar... I'll be more impressed if they can actually grow unit shipments quarter after quarter.
I mean... for 99% of the server tasks out there where are you going to see massive improvements due to altivec? You don't see apache getting big gains from using SSE on x86. Much more important to the xserve's large performance increase over past apple offerings was the new DDR bus, and the just as important new architecture with some mondo bridge chips for cutting the processors out of the equation as much as possible via DMA requests. This is because the bandwidth to the processor is very limited with the current machines in general, and in a dual config they have to share it... cutting them out of the process helped a lot.
That's why you hardly saw any improvement with the new DDR machines for things like photoshop over the past towers, as bandwidth but for server related tasks it helps sooo much.
Add to that the power consumption (or rather lack thereof), and for large numbers of servers, the Xserve becomes even more attractive in terms of lower electricity and cooling costs.
I'd be interested in knowing just what thermal savings there actually are in using an xserve over a competing x86/sparc 1U server. I've used them, and they are NOT cool running machines... they're very hot, and extremely noisy as a quick google will show.
People always think that the PPC is so much cooler than x86, and in general it is... but we aren't talking about 1/4 of the thermals here. Crack open a new P4 or AMD box and there is some big heatsink stuff going on there... kinda funny. Crack open a G4 quicksilver where Apple has been having to essentially overclock the processor and they're ungodly big also, and run really, really hot with huge fans that have made their customers pretty peeved. Just look at these pictures to get an idea of just how big the heatsinks are in new mac towers... and realize that the fans are very, very loud.
So we know that the current G4's are hot as hell, as are the pentiums and amd processors. Apple uses some monster chipsets as well, and it isn't as though apple uses different disk drives or memory... so where are the big thermal savings with the xserve? Companies make custom enclosures like this and this just to make them run cooler and quieter... I doubt people would spend the money on them if there simply wasn't a problem.
Now if you were talking about something like this... gotcha. But they're a whole different ball of wax.
Don't get me wrong- the xserve is cool, and a lot of the points you make about it are valid... as are things like this (largest xserve cluster i know of). But it isn't a miracle worker and it isn't a cool and quiet server.
Exactly my point: Intergraph moved from their propietary line of HW and OS, to a wintel line. We know what happened next. DEC pushed M$ products in lieu of their Own VMS and Unix solutions, we see the support that M$ gave to the Alpha.... and on and on. IBM retained their core technologies, i.e. AIX/Mainframe/OS400, and PowerPC/POWER hw, they did not ditched their own stuff for a dive into a wintel only solutions providement.
Same reason the ultra-bulletproof zSeries are set up the same way. Shit happens, and when it hits the fan, you want a spare fan.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
I agree that this is a good way for Sun to make money in the computer business. Solaris is better than Linux at certain things and that will differentiate Sun enough for customers to go with them.
Beware the Linux distributions that come out of Sun. It is in their interests to make it look bad compared with Solaris. They tried the same thing with x86 Solaris. They made it so crappy to try to convince customers to switch their hardware from x86 to Sparc.
Hardware (servers in particular) are becoming more and more commodity-like as standard components work their way up the enterprise stack. Sun can't play there, they're too inefficient compared with a company like Dell that has much lower overhead - Dell has minimal inventory and just about 0 R&D cost. In a commodity market the leanest players win and Sun is a big fat pig.
Go with software and services. It works for IBM.