Last of the Red Hot Sun Servers

It's unclear exactly how the Sun will set this month or what Oracle will be doing with the hardware side of Sun. Will Sun servers soon get a coat of Oracle Red and an "Unbreakable" stamp? Whatever happens, it seems that Oracle will be inheriting a hardware engineering group that's firing on all cylinders. The new Sun Fire X2270 and Sun Fire X4270 servers are the fastest x64 servers Sun has ever produced.

By Paul Venezia
Wed, August 19, 2009

InfoWorld — It's unclear exactly how the Sun will set this month or what Oracle will be doing with the hardware side of Sun. Will Sun servers soon get a coat of Oracle Red and an "Unbreakable" stamp? Whatever happens, it seems that Oracle will be inheriting a hardware engineering group that's firing on all cylinders. The new Sun Fire X2270 and Sun Fire X4270 servers are the fastest x64 servers Sun has ever produced.

The Biggest Loser in Oracle-Sun Deal: SAP
Oracle Drinks Too Much of Its Own Kool-Aid

The Sun X2270 is a low-cost, 1U rack mount system starting at just $1,488. The X4270 is the X2270's big brother, a 2U system starting at $3,445. Both servers can run one or two Intel Nehalem CPUs, from the 2.0GHz E5504s to the high-end 2.93GHz X5570s. But whereas the X2270 packs a lot of compute power in a somewhat constrained chassis, the X4270 offers slightly more power in a much more expansive box. My evaluation units both had two X5570 CPUs and 24GB of DDR3 RAM.

[ What if Oracle bought Sun Microsystems? Expect radical changes. Learn the 10 ways Oracle could make money from Sun. ]

The quick skinny: The X2270 would do extremely well as a front-end Web server, a small database server, or a member of a virtualization farm, with the addition of a few NICs or an HBA. It's constrained by a single power supply, a single PCIe slot, only a pair of NICs, and four disk drive bays, but the low cost offsets these limitations, depending on the application.

The X4270 is the best of both worlds, offering the 2U form factor that adds significant expansion opportunities and a wealth of local disk options. This is a shoe-in for a database server, application server, storage server, or basically anything you can throw at it. With the ability to house more than 2.3TB locally across sixteen 146GB SAS drives, four gigabit NICs, redundant power, and six expansion slots, there's little that this box can't handle.

Virtual test benchTo test each server, I opted for my baseline VMware test application, which is a LAMP stack packaged as a vSphere vApp with four VMs. This test is designed to mimic a large, database-driven Web application, using a randomized mix of dynamic and static page delivery. It's built on four CentOS 5.3 servers: a single MySQL server built with four vCPUs and 8GB of RAM, two Web front-end servers with two vCPUs and 4GB of RAM each, and a load balancer with a single vCPU and 1GB of RAM. The Web servers run a tweaked Apache 2.2 Web server, with content mounted on an NFS share to the database server. The database server runs a highly tweaked MySQL 5.1.25 installation and exports the Web root to the front-end servers. All load balancing is handled by Nginx, running in the load balancer VM.

1 2 3 next page »

You are here: Technology Topics » Operating Systems » Review

Most Recent Operating Systems Stories

White Papers »

Watson - A System Designed for Answers. The future of workload optimized systems design

Watson is a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and DeepQA technology. Read the white paper about Watson's workload optimized system design.

It's A Bold Statement from IBM: "the one system that will unite all the others."

With 1.5 billion instructions in one second (BIPS), while consuming less energy than ever before, Wintergreen Research says IT departments need to sit up and take notice of this hybrid system that combines the System z with servers.

Has Your Server Infrastructure Kept Pace with End User Demands?

Learn how your answer to this question compares to your peers by taking this quick poll. See how your peers are dealing with the challenge of ensuring a highly capable server infrastructure as technological shifts impact the application server platform.

Enterprise Strategy Group: The Case for a New Data-centric DLP White Paper

With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security. The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough. Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs.

Data Loss by the Numbers

This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.

Data Loss Prevention Solution for Managing E-Discovery

The rapid growth of data and technology is creating challenges for organizations as this digital data is considered to be business communications and must be preserved according the same industry-specific regulations governing the retention and discovery of emails and more traditional forms of electronic communications. This paper examines the role that Data Loss Prevention ("DLP") technology can play in helping organizations address the challenges of locating information in response to electronic discovery.

Webcasts »

Virtualization Success is a Team Effort

As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.

Customer Spotlight: How IPC The Hospitalist Company Implemented Oracle on VMware

Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Deliver Private Cloud Database as a Service with VMware vFabric Data Director

VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.

Reliable Disaster Protection with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager

A simple, cost-effective disaster-recovery solution for virtual environments is high on the agenda for IT organizations as they virtualize more business-critical applications with VMware. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager-the market-leading disaster-recovery product-ensures the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides centralized management of recovery plans, enables nondisruptive testing and automates site-failover processes.

Introduction to VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5

Traditional disaster recovery solutions are often too expensive, complex and unreliable to meet business requirements. As a result, IT departments are hesitant to expand disaster protection beyond their most critical applications, largely because they are uncertain whether the quality of the protection is really worth its cost. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager 5 is the market-leading disaster recovery product that addresses this situation for organizations of all kinds. It complements VMware vSphere to ensure the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter