Sun Announces New x86 Servers 294
An anonymous reader writes "Sun announced the new V60x and V65x servers (1U and 2U respectively). The 1U has 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs and the 2U has 3.06GHz Xeon CPUs. They also announced a partnership with RedHat and Oracle running on these boxes. RedHat will also start shipping Sun's Java with their distribution."
New??? (Score:4, Informative)
Sweet boxes, I'm definately going to enjoy this new toy. And a lot sexier looking then IBM's proposal.
Re:This could make life easy for redhat users (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sun is taking the same route as SGI (Score:5, Informative)
I've actually been looking at Sun's new entry level servers, the v210 [sun.com] and v240 [sun.com] servers.
The v210 starts at $2,995US, and the large configuration, with 2 1Ghz UltraSparc IIIi processors, 2GB of RAM, 2 36GB 10,000RPM SCSI-III drives, and 4 10/100/1000 network intarfaces comes in at $5,795US. I've seen comparible x86-based servers for more than that.
Price Comparasion (Score:5, Informative)
Sun's 1U Server [sun.com]
At least they are price competitive with IBM. I'm not too sure about Dell but it's a start.
Sun cheaper than Dell? (Score:4, Informative)
Stop the presses, misleading info... (Score:5, Informative)
Red Hat produces more than one product... (Score:3, Informative)
Otherwise, Red Hat produces other distributions (like Advanced Server and Enterprise Server) that might contain proprietary (read: not so free) code and software that may require additional licenses.
The spirit is in open-source - but customer wishes also pay the bills.
Unfortunately... (Score:5, Informative)
So, if you absolutely need a SPARCv9 architecture rackmount, this is the way to go. But featurewise it falls short of say an Altus 140 from Penguin Computing, or even a 1000E if you want 64-bit. And Peng. Comp. is expensive as far as that kind of thing goes.
That being said, the small Enterprises are quite cool, but they aren't as cost effective. It helps if your organization has a pre-existing agreement, and can get you a break.
Re:Sun is taking the same route as SGI (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oracle because... (Score:2, Informative)
IIRC 6-7 months ago a marketing person from Oracle came to our company to discuss if Oracle will be suitable for our next development project, our customer contracted us to develop an online electronic components database with over +20 Million component with all their information, spec sheets. In the first year the database is expected to reach 0.7TB.
I recall asking her that we plan to implement heavy server side logic in stored procedures, and she said "if it couldn't be done with Oracle then it can never be done", you get to love Oracle's marketing people but technically she was right.
The only ready-today open source database that comes near Oracle (actually it is equivalent to Oracle 7) is SAPDB [sapdb.org] and what drives me really nuts is that the open source community ignores it completely in favor for something like MySQL (not that something is wrong with MySQL).
Re:They don't care that Sun Java is non-free? (Score:1, Informative)
Routeness (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where does HP fit (Score:3, Informative)
Then you go to make your powerpoint presentation to the board and you have everything budgeted and guaranteed. Hero!
Re:Sun is taking the same route as SGI (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I don't know if I agree with you about Sun not being worth the premium.
We run a very large web site that mainly consists of cheap Intel based hardware. But at the core of it all we've always used Sun servers with Solaris. Sure, the Sun servers have always cost us 10 times the price of comparable Intel hardware, but the Sun hardware comes with two things the Intel hardware does not:
1) The hardware (and the OS) is remarkably stable. One server ran for five years under heavy load the entire time without needing any maintenance. In the same time period we had to replace a lot of the Intel hardware.
2) In the unlikely event that something actually breaks, even if it's at 2AM in the morning, a guy comes rushing in and repairs the machine. The most amazing thing is that he always seems to have the right spare parts stored away, just in case. It's a fantastic service, and when you run a large scale, business critical operation, that kind of service is _extremely_ valuable.
And although this has nothing to do with hardware, there's (for me) an important point that concerns the OS too:
3) Even when upgrading the OS from 2.6 to 9, old software and strange old Apache modules (which we have to continue using, even though it's developer has stopped supporting them a long time ago) keeps working. I can't think of many Linux binaries from 1997 that would work for me out-of-the-box on a modern distribution today.
I'm not saying Intel hardware or Linux is bad, but I say that there are a few cases where the safety that overpriced Sun hardware can give you, gets more or less priceless.
Re:YES! (Score:5, Informative)
Sun performance: It has long been common knowledege that for low-end stuff, Intel boxes cannot be beat in the bang-for-buck game. People who use low-end Sparc stuff use it because they need Solaris for whatever reason. Probably because they use Solaris in the data center. No arguemnet that their low-end Sparc stuff is not particularly powerful. But in x86 world, that playing field is now more or less even.
Sun reliability: Compared to HP or Compaq, yes I'm not sure I could legitimately argue that Sun stuff is more reliable. Comparable, sure, but then again our wall of Compaq ProLiant servers have rarely failed either. Dell? We've bought a bunch of their junk and it fails WAY more often than anything else. Worse yet, try calling Dell support and trying to talk to somebody that can actually help you. Sun is MILES ahead in this area, and for corporate customers, that's important.
I'm not saying that Sun is the end-all-be-all of computing, but they *absolutely* can be competitive in this market if they do things right. And stop comparing them to Dell
Re:Focus on bus speed (Score:3, Informative)
These servers address those parts of a customer's application that may not need those spiffy and expensive busses. It is good for Sun to adequately address this part of the business. They need to keep their big box customers from getting distracted when shopping Dell or IBM for pizzabox application servers.
Re:Sun is taking the same route as SGI (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sun is taking the same route as SGI (Score:2, Informative)
I've been on the lookout for this (and possibly webobjects uptake) and just haven't seen it... where I have seen xserve adoption has been in certain areas where macs would have been the preferred platform (ie, mac clients) but for many reasons they had to go with a higher-end unix or NT server as apple just didn't have much to offer for that market. There was a small market for people who wanted to use Apple servers but they just didn't meet their needs- so Apple saw a big spike in sales for them when they were released. Heck, some of these people use OS9 with webstar... I'll be more impressed if they can actually grow unit shipments quarter after quarter.
I mean... for 99% of the server tasks out there where are you going to see massive improvements due to altivec? You don't see apache getting big gains from using SSE on x86. Much more important to the xserve's large performance increase over past apple offerings was the new DDR bus, and the just as important new architecture with some mondo bridge chips for cutting the processors out of the equation as much as possible via DMA requests. This is because the bandwidth to the processor is very limited with the current machines in general, and in a dual config they have to share it... cutting them out of the process helped a lot.
That's why you hardly saw any improvement with the new DDR machines for things like photoshop over the past towers, as bandwidth but for server related tasks it helps sooo much.
Add to that the power consumption (or rather lack thereof), and for large numbers of servers, the Xserve becomes even more attractive in terms of lower electricity and cooling costs.
I'd be interested in knowing just what thermal savings there actually are in using an xserve over a competing x86/sparc 1U server. I've used them, and they are NOT cool running machines... they're very hot, and extremely noisy as a quick google will show.
People always think that the PPC is so much cooler than x86, and in general it is... but we aren't talking about 1/4 of the thermals here. Crack open a new P4 or AMD box and there is some big heatsink stuff going on there... kinda funny. Crack open a G4 quicksilver where Apple has been having to essentially overclock the processor and they're ungodly big also, and run really, really hot with huge fans that have made their customers pretty peeved [g4noise.com]. Just look at these pictures to get an idea of just how big the heatsinks are in new mac towers... and realize that the fans are very, very loud.
So we know that the current G4's are hot as hell, as are the pentiums and amd processors. Apple uses some monster chipsets as well, and it isn't as though apple uses different disk drives or memory... so where are the big thermal savings with the xserve? Companies make custom enclosures like this [norenproducts.com] and this just to make them run cooler and quieter... I doubt people would spend the money on them if there simply wasn't a problem.
Now if you were talking about something like this [terrasoftsolutions.com]... gotcha. But they're a whole different ball of wax.
Don't get me wrong- the xserve is cool, and a lot of the points you make about it are valid... as are things like this [daugerresearch.com] (largest xserve cluster i know of). But it isn't a miracle worker and it isn't a cool and quiet server.
Re:SGI didn't see the signs (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:2, Informative)
I believe the USIIIi have a built in 266MHz DDR controller. The ram is 266 MHz DDR.
Re:wow (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Competing Solaris against Linux (Score:4, Informative)
Beware the Linux distributions that come out of Sun. It is in their interests to make it look bad compared with Solaris. They tried the same thing with x86 Solaris. They made it so crappy to try to convince customers to switch their hardware from x86 to Sparc.
Hardware (servers in particular) are becoming more and more commodity-like as standard components work their way up the enterprise stack. Sun can't play there, they're too inefficient compared with a company like Dell that has much lower overhead - Dell has minimal inventory and just about 0 R&D cost. In a commodity market the leanest players win and Sun is a big fat pig.
Go with software and services. It works for IBM.