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?

[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.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because there is none.

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 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: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.