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

Who says they are?

[IANAAC]

Who would have thought only a few years ago that Sun would be the new champion of Linux and AMD?"

They're doing what they have to do to survive.

If they had their way, it'd be Solaris/Sparc all the way.

Re:Who says they are?

[saleenS281]

you confused "survive" with "grow and maximize profit". As if Sun is going anywhere anytime soon. They're going to die just like novell, BSD, and Microsoft are.
Sun realizes that the opteron provides nearly the performance of their sparc at a cheaper price... why not bundle it up and make MORE money since the cream of the crop for them is service. And more systems sold==more people buying service contracts. And lord knows cheaper prices==more systems sold.

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:Who says they are?

[Bert64]

Sparc was never really designed for raw performance, but if you consider the performance drop as you increase the load on a system, sparc holds up much better than most other architectures and this is what sparc is designed for. Sparc also scales very nicely to large numbers of processors and is well proven in this field.
Also, Opteron is much newer than sparc, a lot of businesses won't trust something that hasn't been around a few years and is well proven.

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.

4-ways are nice and all

[Shut the fuck up!]

But for years I have been looking for a 3-way. My wife, is uh, not very compatible.

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.

Rebadged Newisys 4300?

[Master Bait]

Not that that is a bad thing, but I cannot see any difference between the V40z and this.

Re:Rebadged Newisys 4300?

[ArkiMage]

Yeah.. We have multiple Newisys 2100's and recently bought Sun 20z's which are the same thing. Cheaper as Sun than Newisys as well. The 4300 and 40z are identical as well. Oh, and Newisys will NOT offer firmware on their website. Sun does...

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.

Hmmm

[Neil Blender]

Reading through the benchmarks, I see they compiled KDE under gentoo in just under 17 weeks. I'm impressed.

Re:Hmmm

[jd]

You think that's bad? You notice the benchmark is for 2.6.4, but kernel.org is at 2.6.11-pre4-mm1. That tells you how long it took to do the download on this box.

Fast Kernel Compile

[AFCArchvile]

2 minute, 30 second Linux 2.6.4 kernel compile!

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.

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:I suspected

[DesScorp]

Sparc isn't dead...Sun just realized that they can't keep up with Intel and IBM in the chip wars by themselves. They've teamed up with a Japanese company (Fujitsu?) for future Sparc development. Sparc will be for high-end customers only. They're positioning Opteron for the cheap end.

Re:Since when...

[Lehk228]

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.

Re:I love the combination...

[TheKarateMaster]

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.)

Re:I smell ...

[otis wildflower]

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 :/

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.

What was so good about these dead systems?

[Ars-Fartsica]

Was it a modern open unix? You can have that on x86.

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.

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:What was so good about these dead systems?

[SoupIsGood Food]

Was it high performance? x86 outperforms all of your examples on a per-CPU basis.

This is a recent phenomenon, and has more to do with the politics of monopoly and inept business strategy.

In their heydey, MiPS, Alpha and PA-RISC were neck-and-neck in terms of performance, because all were funded and developed by vibrant companies at the top of their game. Sun was slower, especially in the benchmarks, but had other advantages (like its unreal low-latency).

Then along came Rick Belluzzo, who set both HP and SGI on the Itanium/WindowsNT deathmarch, killing off R&D for all three of the top-tier RISC/Unix architectures... once HP bought Compaq, they destroyed the old DEC R&D machine, and the Alpha with it, mostly out of spite.

What would have happened if HP hadn't decided to burn its bridges for Itanium? What would have happened if SGI had hired a CEO who decided to keep them on the RISC/Unix track and to keep Mips rather than spin it off?

You would see a top teir of premium processors, and a second tier of processors x86 could almost compete with. The way it was in '97, before "Merced" and "NT" were going to be the future of technical computing.

Was it incredible graphics? These geezers don't have access to modern gpus.

Modern SGI workstations, while laboring under an antiquated processor, have GPU subsystems you gamerboys can only have fond wet-dreams about.

Even still, past history shows that with a viable high-performance oriented platform, high performance innovation takes place that takes a few years to filter down to the commodity platforms: SCSI, Fiberchannel, crossbar connections for subsystems, wide datapath expansion cards (DEC's 64bit PCI comes immediately to mind), and GPU subsystems like anything from SGI or HP's Visualize.

Commodity gear has caught up, only because of Moore's law. The vendors essentially gave up their cutting-edge workstation and server markets to push their commodity systems, thinking they would offer higher margins and a wider customer base.

Instead, Dell took everything, slashing margins and eroding everyone else's share of the x86 pie.

Now Sun is making the same mistakes.

Understandable, though, as their SPARC R&D has been a complete mess. The Fujitsu SPARC chips are kinda sexy, but getting long in the tooth.

Opteron is a last-gasp stopmeasure for Sun. It will probably do little except irritate their longterm Solaris/SPARC customers.

SoupIsGood Food

Opetorns're for low end customers

[reachbach]

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... :-) ]

Re:They will lose

[SunFan]

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.

Re:I suspected

[vrai]

Can you fit more than eight Opterons in a single machine? Can the CPUs be hot swapped? Do they have the proven uptime record of UltraSparcs?

If the answer to any of these questions is 'No' then I forsee a continued market for Sparc hardware. Banks spend millions on new Sparc kit every year - for both new and legacy applications. Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, not every task is suitable for clustering. The bandwidth between nodes is still far too small, and the network induced lag far too great.

When you can get five-nines uptime out of a thirty processor Opteron box - then it'll be time to retire the Sparc range. Until that day comes they'll always have a market.

Re:Champion of Linux?

[nonmaskable]

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.