4-Way Sun Fire V40z Reviewed

Hack Jandy writes "Anandtech has a pretty thorough analysis of Sun's V40z 4-way Opteron server that fits in a 3U. Among some of the more noteable benchmarks include a 2 minute, 30 second Linux 2.6.4 kernel compile! Who would have thought only a few years ago that Sun would be the new champion of Linux and AMD?"

Comments

Solaris and AMD

[uid100]

I have been running six V20z in production for about ten months now. They have - and will continue to - run Solaris. These servers have been as stable and predictiable as the V480's I manage, but compile Apache in 1/5 the time. They are definitly a sweet hardware platform, but why discount Solaris on them (in the title of this "news", by omition?)

My new AMD64 powered Gateway 7405GX is running Solaris-10 - works great! And a 64 bit kernel.

Re:Solaris and AMD

[k8to]

Strange.

I've actually _tried_ all those distributions on a Sun 20z, and while Gentoo and SuSE both worked fine, FreeBSD and Debian aren't even ready for x86_64. Red Hat was notably unworkable, sadly. Maybe we only sacrificed enough goats for two distritubions.

Specs

[zerocool^]

From Sun's site:

http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v40z/index.jsp

* Linear Processor Scalability
* Lights Out Management (LOM) with integrated service processor
* Redundant, hot-swap power and cooling
* Supports existing 32-bit x86 OS and applications

* Up to 4 AMD Opteron 800 Series processors
* Up to 32 GB
* Up to six hot-swap Ultra320 SCSI disks

- Solaris 10 on x64
- Solaris 9 HW 4/04 OS or later for x86 Platforms
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 for AMD Opteron
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
- SUSE Linux 9 Professional (Community Edition)
- Microsoft Windows 2000 (WHCL-certified)
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (WHCL-certified)

The price, listed at http://www.sun.com/emrkt/opteronpromo/product.html
shows the server @ $5945, which imho is quite a reasonable price for this kind of heavy hitting hardware.

I've always had a thing for sun hardware. It's just... sexy.

~Wx

Re:Rebadged Newisys 4300?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because there is none.

Re:Rebadged Newisys 4300?

[voidptr]

Silicon Mechanics sells the same box as well under the nServ A400 name.

Re:4-year-old dupe :)

[BillKaos]

Check the compiler version. New gcc versions got very slow.

Andrew Morton uses gcc 2.95, because it's 2x faster compiling the kernel.

Re:Just been wondering about this

[prockcore]

Apple continues to make MacOS X Server more and more robust, and if they could reduce the price on the XServes, then for many environments why not run MacOS X?

Because the Darwin kernel has pisspoor I/O. Which makes for a slow server.

Re:Who says they are?

[Anonymous Coward]

for 20 years before the Opteron (if you carry the performance differential with other microprocessors back) the expensive Sparc was the only option for that relative level of performance.

Baloney. In terms of performance, Sparc has always trailed the competition, except possibly for a few months back in the late 80s when the SparcStation 1 pizzabox was first released (the few sparcs before that were nothing special).

Even today, Sparc trails Opteron performance. Just look up the SpecFP and SpecInt numbers, fastest opteron is faster than the fastest sparc, and that's Fujitsu's sparc, Sun's own chips are even slower.

PS, Sparc has not been around for 20 years, just barely 15.

Re:What was so good about these dead systems?

[igb]

With a monoculture, what happens if something
we've not yet thought of turns out to be hard
with x86? Ever wonder why in WW2 every air force
kept production lines running for at least fighters
and at least two bombers? Because if when they needed
an increment of performance the tails started
falling off, they had another gene pool to try
the same trick with (why did the UK keep making
Spitfires when the Tempest was clearly better
in every way? B17 vs B24? P47 vs P51? 109 vs
190)?

Had the RAF decided that the Spitfire was where the
action was in 1942 and shut Hawker down, they'd
never have had the aircraft they needed to deal
with the 262 and the V1. Had they decided that
the Spitfire wasn't going to deliver the performance
of what was coming through Hawker, they'd have
been shafted when the tails started falling off
Typhoons (elevator flutter: very hard to diagnose
in 1943).

Same's true of processors. Sadly.

ian

Re:Who says they are?

[SunFan]

I love it (and hate it) when comments like the parent, here, get modded insightful. The SPARCstation 20 maxes out at four 200MHz Ross CPUs. It might be as fast, in aggregate, as a ~1GHz Pentium III. The SBus (like PCI) and probably the RAM in the SS20 are also comparable to a motherboard for the Pentium III. This was all very impressive for the mid-to-late 1990s, when the SS20 was hot stuff.