Comments on: Server Vendor Analysis So Far

By: SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » Blog Archive » Server Analysis - Sun victory!

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 01:02:35 +0000

[...] We started evaluating server vendors about two weeks ago, and I’m happy to declare a winner. Sun just got my business and I’m excited to see how they stand up to some hardcore scrutiny once they’re in my datacenters. [...]

By: onethumb

onethumb — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 18:30:09 +0000

@Byron:

I have something like 14 years of heavy-duty Linux experience, and the Solaris user experience is just too foreign to me, I’m afraid.

That Fault Management stuff sounds awesome, truly. Wish I could use it.

Don

By: Byron

Byron — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:10:00 +0000

Hi,

I’ve just begun using SmugMug, and do not yet have any public galleries, but I’ve worked at Sun for 7 years now. I have always worked on Linux while at Sun (coming from the Cobalt acquisition). My software goes in to ILOM (Integrated Lights-Out Management), now becoming common on new systems.

My particular portion is work on Fault Management. While I knew you have had some problems with Solaris 10 performance in the past, if you can work through them one of the big advantages will be fault management: what happens when part of one DIMM goes bad? With Solaris, the defective pages are mapped out of service and a notification posted. Similar actions can occur for CPU cores/chips.

All of this is just to point out that there may be more advantages to Sun products than the specs indicate, with some of the nifty new goo being less obvious than we might like sometimes.

Byron

By: Mark Mayo

Mark Mayo — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 11:15:55 +0000

Note that the X2200 uses the nvidia nforce chipset for it’s onboad SATA controller, and two of the four network ports (the other two are broadcom). My experience with the Linux drivers for the nvidia hardware has been less than stellar.. I have no idea how good/bad the Solaris drivers are. The X4100, by comparison, uses all “proven” hardware with mature drivers (in both Linux and Solaris). LSi SAS controller, Intel GigE. That being said, the X2200 is priced considerably better, and gets you rev. F opterons and faster memory.

If you do look at IBM, their x3550 and x3560 boxes are really quite good. Fast, solid component selection (LSi SAS, broadcom gige), and well built.

By: Jeff Bonwick

Jeff Bonwick — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 11:02:19 +0000

Well, I can’t claim to be unbiased: I’m currently the CTO for Sun’s storage business, and was previously the project lead for ZFS. That said, I work on this stuff because I’m passionate about it. ZFS on Thumper is great combination for cost-sensitive and density-sensitive environments. 48 disks + 4 Opteron cores per 4U of rack space for around $2/GB. Drop me a line if you’d like to get together for a mutual deep-dive on Sun’s technology and your business needs. It’d be fun…

By: Bob Samuels

Bob Samuels — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 01:11:48 +0000

I just got a Snapfish promotion from HP – why would you want to give them your money? All they’ll do is use it to put you out of business. It’d be like buying a server from Kodak.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 01:06:31 +0000

Sun has a variety of management processors in its systems (perhaps too many, but that should improve in the future).

The smaller UltraSPARC systems like the Sun Fire T1000 have ALOM, which doesn’t have web-based access and has a dedicated network port.

The X4000 series “Galaxy” Opteron systems have ILOM, which adds the web-based KVM functions and also has a dedicated network port.

The X2000 series Opteron systems have the same functionality as the ILOM but share one of the main system’s network ports.

I think it’s kind of cool to download an ISO image to your laptop and then boot your server from it.

By: onethumb

onethumb — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:56:19 +0000

@Dave:

Wow, so it does! We may have a winner!

I haven’t played with the Opteron management, just the T1000 management. Sounds like it may do exactly what we want. Thanks for the info!

By: onethumb

onethumb — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 23:55:20 +0000

@ J.S.

Thanks for the info. I’ll keep it in mind.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:57:59 +0000

The Sun Fire X2200 M2 has 2 sockets, 16 DIMM slots, and the Lights Out Management shares one of the 4 GBE ports:

http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x2200

I’m surprised at your comments about the management on Sun’s Opteron systems. With just a browser you get remote graphical console, keyboard, mouse, DVD, floppy, and ISO image support.