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.

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: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.