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?"

Re:I love the combination...

[GreyWolf3000]

Ummm...what do you think Gentoo is? A *BSD distribution?

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.

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:Specs

[Neil Blender]

shows the server @ $5945, which imho is quite a reasonable price for this kind of heavy hitting hardware.

Not that I looked or anything, but I am sure $5945 most likely gets you 1 weak processor, the onboard ram and an ide drive. Max it out and you could be looking an $20K or more.

Re:Champion of Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun had to buy IP from SCO for OpenSolaris and some device drivers. Get over it, because the deal wasn't to drive SCO's lawsuits.

This SCO-Sun conspiracy theory has just got to die. It is really annoying.

Re:Specs

[Anonymous Coward]

The link that grandparent provides has the following specs:

Sun Fire V40z Server Special
2 AMD Opteron Model 844 Processors
2-GB Memory
1 73-GB 10000 RPM Ultra320 SCSI Disk Drive
1 DVD-ROM/Floppy Drive
2 10/100/1000 Ethernet Ports
1 USB Port
1 Serial Port
Lights Out Management (LOM) Software
Solaris 9 4/04 x86 Operating System

Doesn't seem too bad, considering they charge an extra $3300.00 (US) per processor. After adding 2 more processors, 4GB RAM, (2) 146GB Hard Drives, and upgrading the warranty to 3 Years Silver Support, the total went all the way up to $17,620.00.

Re:Solaris and AMD

[Jeff.Schramm]

I hadn't noticed the Solaris Linux Application Environment in Solaris 10 before. Sun has some interesting things to say about it at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/ds/linux_inter op.jsp [sun.com]. I wonder how well it works.

Sun is taking Linux interoperability to the next level with the new Solaris Linux Application Environment feature in the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) for AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon x86-based systems. The Solaris Linux Application Environment (LAE) allows Linux applications to run unchanged on the Solaris OS when coupled with a Linux distribution. This enables businesses to take advantage of the innovations in the Solaris 10 OS without sacrificing investments in existing Linux applications.

Re:Rebadged Newisys 4300?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because there is none. [theregister.com]

Re:Rebadged Newisys 4300?

[voidptr]

Silicon Mechanics [siliconmechanics.com] sells the same box as well under the nServ A400 [siliconmechanics.com] name.

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.

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.

Re:Who says they are?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you understand written English language sentences? Are you able to comprehend paragraphs in that language also? You have no point, the differences of price was acknowledged; the very sentence "Sun realizes that the opteron provides nearly the performance of their sparc at a cheaper price" means that the performance of Sun's Sparc processor are nearly mirrored in the much cheaper Opteron from AMD. There is no contention that the Opteron is not cheaper, the comments seemingly were made because 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.

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: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:Specs

[codeguy007]

That's expensive. We sell our 4U quads for less than that. 3300 US per proc is way high btw. AMD's price for new 852 is only $1514

Re:WAY WAY WAY.....

[chrome]

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.

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.

Re:What's so special?

[SunFan]

The GP rebuttal still stands: The Appro system has no redundant power supplies or lights-out management capabilities. Can they put four of the fastest Opterons in 1U and still cool them reliably? Also, the 600GB in disks is with IDE not SCSI.

These systems are just for entirely different purposes: one is a compute cluster node, the other is suitable for running a business.