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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?"
If they had their way, it'd be Solaris/Sparc all the way.
"Who would have thought only a few years ago that Sun would be the new champion of Linux and AMD?"
I knew that the ultraSPARC was dead a few years ago. Not surprised at the current Sun situation.
Vote for Pedro
But for years I have been looking for a 3-way. My wife, is uh, not very compatible.
At any rate, this is supposed to be a server. This thing could handle lots of SQL transactions, send and receive mail, serve webpages, and even, as you might have guessed, compile stuff. All of these can be done on any distribution.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
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.
...yup...
Not that that is a bad thing, but I cannot see any difference between the V40z and this.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Reading through the benchmarks, I see they compiled KDE under gentoo in just under 17 weeks. I'm impressed.
That's pretty fast compared to what I've done: compiling 2.4.27 in Gentoo on a Sun Ultra 2 (2 x 300 MHz UltraSPARC). It took over 90 minutes, and that was without the USB and Bluetooth sections of the kernel, since there's no way the Ultra 2 can make any use of either.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
From Sun's site:
l
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.htm
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
sig?
I wonder how long to kompile KDE. That's the worst part of a Gentoo install for me.
Grrr, any Sybase engineer could tell when the HELL they are going to deliver Sybase ASE on Linux 64-bit for Opteron???
We're just waiting for this at work to move to all this cool hardware! Geez... chalk one more for moving to Oracle!
Since when... (Score:1)
the kernel compilarion speed is a benchmark factor for a server hardware.
because it is something that many home users as well as server admins have actually performed on various machines and gives a better measure of performance to people than some arbitrary benchmark score.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
its free marketing.
the purpose here is too move product after all and make their shareholders money.
im not surprised at all
Yeah... umm... I'm *pretty* sure Gentoo *is* Linux...
Don't want to start a disto war here or anything, but I think we can all agree that Linspire is by *far* the best, anyway.
P.S.(Don't shoot me, I'm just kidding, I use Debian.)
4 years ago slashdot posted a story introducing the first Dual-processor athlon system and used the linux kernel compilation time as a benchmark.
A little over 4 years ago, a Dual Processor Athlon System compiled the kernel in 2 minutes flat. The kernel was version 2.4.0ac12.
I'm no software/hardware developer, so I'm not going to comment on the significance of this result, but nonetheless I find it interesting that the kernel took less time to compile on a much more modest system 4 years ago. Has the kernel really grown THAT much?
Think about it --- they were using two 1.2ghz 32-bit processors with 256mb of ram opposed to the four 64-bit processors with 8gb of ram in this test, and it still took 20% longer to compile!!!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I suspect that kernel building does not run in parallel very easy.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Before the Sun lovers go chanting ga-ga-ga about how this will save Sun's sorry ass or how it outperforms their "other" systems , I'd like to put forward some numbers running similar tests against whitebox systems.
/usr/lib/gcc-lib/x86_64-redhat-linux/3.2.3/specs
Configured with: ../configure --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --enable-shared --enable-threads=posix --disable-checking --with-system-zlib --enable-__cxa_atexit --host=x86_64-redhat-linux
Config: On my 8GB 246 (single processor, whitebox) opteron I get (make distclean etc between steps)
Time / Kernel / Make option
2"12s / 2.4.21 (time make -j5)
3m33.081s / 2.6.4 (time make -j5)
3m31s / 2.6.4 (time make -3)
From anandtech for the 2.6.4 kernel.
2"43 sec V40Z -j5
3"30 sec V40z -j3
4" 34 sec W2100Z -j3
Hmm.. for the 5K I paid for it. I'm happy waiting 50 seconds more.. ( 5K v/s 17K and 3"30' v/s 2"43')
Misc info:..
gcc -v
Reading specs from
Thread model: posix
gcc version 3.2.3 20030502 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.3-42)
make --version
GNU Make version 3.79.1, by Richard Stallman and Roland McGrath.
Built for x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu
-- everyones not everybody and neither is everybody like everyone.
Hell, what server admin runs Linux, the lowest common denominator of Unix and Unix-workalies, on a real server?
:/
Take a trip to NYC, walk out of the Wall St. 4/5 station, pick a tall building, go up on the roof, unzip your fly, and take a piss. Inside the building you hit you will find a company that transacts hundreds of thousands of dollars of business per MINUTE.
On Linux.
Better be quick though, as there's TONS of jobs moving across the Hudson
If 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? From looking through guides to OSX Server, it seems really straight forward to setup and maintain compared to even most Linux distributions and looks like it just might be something that if marketed correctly could at least clobber Windows Server for many small business server needs.
I remember taking a networking class a year and a half ago where we did Red Hat 9 and Windows 2000. Even though I already was comfortable with Linux, it just seemed to be a lot easier to configure than Windows. In fact, I was actually quite amazed at how much harder it was to get Windows to do something server-related through all of the GUIs than it was to do it on Linux. Combine the fact that OSX is a UNIX clone at its core and that it's GUI is well-designed and terribly slick, I just can't imagine why most companies don't even look at it. If kept safely behind a good firewall it should be easy as hell for non-geeks to keep running for basic things like file/printer sharing.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
No... gentoo != good server distro. I am a satisfied gentoo user on the desktop, and I run a very small server (alongside my desktop, just for light personal use). I don't use gentoo for the speed, I use it for the customizability. Portage is a great tool. Ideally, the Gentoo project would make portage a tool which can be put on top of other distros, as they do have advantages. Portage, at the moment, is more or less tied to gentoo, so gentoo is what I use. There are binaries for things like KDE, and besides, it's not like I need everything now. I can be patient unlike some people. That being said, these qualities do not make a good server. You might want something like Debian or slackware for that.
What about this ProLiant DL585 server from HP. It seems very comprable (4 Opterons, 8 or so PCI-X slots, configurable with lots of memory and storage, not to mention a similar price point). There are links to a few benchmarks on that page. Anyone have any experience with the DL585 or similar HP servers or know how they compare to these servers from Sun?
Was it high performance? x86 outperforms all of your examples on a per-CPU basis.
Was it incredible graphics? These geezers don't have access to modern gpus.
Was it rugged hardware? x86 boxes are now equipped as good or better than any of your examples.
I'm not sure what it is you got out of using these systems that represents a legit advantage.
Sun's selling linux/opteron boxes only to low end customers. Remember, a linux box comes kick ass cheap and does not have half the features of S10. But for the serious ones, Sun still offers S10 on Sparc(heard of the 32 way Niagara?that's what you would call a beast of a server.A server for real internet workloads). The take home points:
:-) ]
1)Sun sells Linux too(surprise,surprise!!).
2)It does this for the low end guys
3)Sparc is still the defacto chip for any serious high end customer.
4)Sun's amd boxes will be far superior to those of IBM & HP. Why? 'cos HP & IBM don't have their own industry standard OSes, while sun has a beauty in the form of Solaris10 that will give you better value for money on your AMD64 processors.
Finally,learn to accept the truth.Call a spade a spade.S10 is simply a superioir OS to any other OS that exists on this planet today. Embrace it or be left behind. Use DTrace if you like S10 or be content with using top and gather cobwebs snuggling up to a cute penguin.
[ And the Sun never sets forever...
Look at Alpha - fastest platform in its day but it had the stink of death even though a well-heeled company (more than one through acquisitions) was being it.
Even thought the quality of Sun's marketing dept. is certainly open for debate, it is clearly better than DEC's was.
What is a "high end" chip anyway?
One thing that differentiates UltraSPARC from Opteron is that UltraSPARC is designed to scale to over 1000 CPUs in a system. Opteron's sweet-spot is up to 8 CPUs. Otherwise, both CPUs have similar characteristics, such as ECC support, etc.
A lot of work can get done with 8 CPUs, but for everything else, there's UltraSPARC, POWER, and Itanium.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Well, a high end chip is one designed for throughput as well as number crunching on tiny data sets. In fact the biggest problem for most computational problems today is not cycles but memory bandwidth, and a Sparc system delivers memory bandwidth in spades for a large number of processors. The Sun machines are unfortunatly for Sun not needed by that many people as many classes of large jobs have had architectures designed that allow them to run on piles of comodity wintel/lintel servers. Sun realizes this and want to be the guy that supplies you with those comodity boxes as well as the big back end database server that feeds them all. Another fine example of a high end chip is the PA-RISC chip which does checksuming in every component and which runs all calculations through either two CPU's or two cores to make sure that hardware errors don't produce data errors. That's not something that tends to produce the fastest chip on a given process but there are companies willing to pay for it, which makes it a high end chip.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
In the "driver deal", SCO gave Sun options to buy a bunch of SCO stock at $1.83 per share. This was shortly before SCO's big linux license FUD PR campaign started, and the stock went over $20/share shortly thereafter. Combine that with McNealy gloating about having the only legal version of linux right after the "driver deal" and there's a lot more here than a conspiracy theory.
If you're buying these machines to run Oracle, the cost of the hardware is dwarfed by the cost of the Oracle licensing.
Most people wouldn't buy these things for anything other than an Oracle box, I think.
My company is looking at these sun boxes because of the support and nice LOM features, to build a 10g RAC system. I'm expecting it to kick the hell out of the old E4500s we have right now.
But, as I said, the licensing is killer. Its like 80% of the price of the whole system. Don't sweat the hardware price so much.
It's a quad-opteron in a 4U chassis. I don't get it, what's so special about that?
I'd be much more impressed with a 1U quad opteron with 32GB of RAM via 16x2GB DDR400 and 1.5TB of storage via 3x500GB drives.
Oh wait. It's already been done. It's called Appro's 1142H, a 1U quad opteron server.