Sun Fire X4600

We ordered two of these servers to form a Microsoft SQL Server cluster for our production Dynamics AX environment, shown pictured above in the rack above an HP MSA 1510i iSCSI SAN controller. Together, it would form a cost effective active/passive cluster that would serve us for several years to come, based on flexible upgrade ability.

The key thing that hit management was the price to performance ratio. Considering this server has the potential to be upgraded to contain eight quad-core 64-bit processors (32 cores) and 64GiB of RAM, all within a 4RU package and cheaper than an 8 core solution from HP, it was an easy decision.

However, this isn't a budget server, nor is it a fast server in a cheap box. This is an amazingly well designed and flexible piece of hardware with a reasonable price. The design aspects caught my eye when I was hunting for a new platform for our database, but it really became apparent once I had the servers in my clutches.

Sun have a long history of designing systems with Uniboards, essentially a pluggable board with a processor and memory on board. The motherboard in such systems are generalised to a point where a range of CPUs are available, and while Sun proved this concept largely with its SPARC systems, they've successfully used the design here for AMD Opteron chips.

For now, quad-core uniboards are unavailable, apparently until AMD solves production issues with their Barcelona chips, but they're on their way.

The processor uniboards are all interconnected using AMD's HyperTransport bus, providing more than ample bandwidth between processors and memory for the level of IO transactions required on a busy SQL server.

The system comes with four built in Gigabit Ethernet ports (two dual-port chips on the motherboard), six PCIe sockets and two PCI-X sockets (both on separate busses, however one is shared with the on-board LSI SAS RAID controller. For our purposes, we needed to add two more dual-port Gigabit Ethernet cards as the machines are to be connected to two identical network switches.

Unlike HP servers, these two servers run practically cold when under heavy processing load; The reason for this is Sun's extremely efficient cooling design. Sun have partitioned the server into two separate cooling zones. On the right hand side a thin partition contains four small form factor disks which are cooled by the fans from four power supplies (running in 2+2 redundancy). On the left, four large fans (also in 2+2 redundancy) immediately cool the processors, and eventually the rest of the components leading out of the rear of the machine.

This design means that the air reaching the processors is already cool, since it hasn't already been warmed by the hard disks, and keeps the over-all temperature of the system quite low which will ultimately provide higher reliability and lower cooling costs for our computer room. This design shows a great deal of thought from the Sun engineers. In comparison, an idle HP ML350 G4 produces enough heat to comfortably warm your hands in a matter of seconds.

When I first powered the machine on, the system performed self-diagnostics and ran all fans at full speed with such force it nearly blew me over! Under normal operation though, it feels more like a gentle, cool breeze.

Finally, I have to mention ILOM (Integrated Lights-Out Management), which is a function similar to HP's iLO (Integrated Lights-Out) or Dell's DRAC. This includes essentially a separate computer that handles video display and provides virtual keyboard, mouse, diskette and CD-ROM drives via the USB bus to the host operating system. Through ILOM, which has its own network connector and serial port, you can manage the system even when it's switched off or failed. ILOM even has a web-based KVM-over-IP functionality, allowing you to control the machine remotely, even during start-up.

Okay, so lights-out management is nothing new to high-end servers, but there is something that makes Sun's implementation interesting: It's free. Hewlett-Packard will give you free access to iLO, but you cannot access all of the advanced functionality without buying licenses. Sun's philosophy here is beautiful: You bought the hardware, why stop you from using it?

All-in-all, this machine has been engineered for a long service life, which is typical of Sun's design philosophy. Most surprising of a machine like this is that the initial investment cost isn't particularly significant at all compared with the offerings from other manufacturers.

Fortunately I've convinced management that Sun is still well and truly in the server game with some impressive products. Welcome back Sun!

Thank you to PFSweb Europe for the chocolates!