Blade Watch

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/248922/sun-microsystems-sun-fire-x4140.html

Verdict: The Sun Fire X4140 is one classy 1U rack server that has more of everything than the competition and is very competitively priced.

If Sun Microsystems wants to make any significant headway with its worldwide server sales it has to take on the likes of Dell and HP at the lower end of this market. That means delivering a solid range of standard Intel and AMD based rack and pedestal systems at affordable prices and with a good range of features. In this exclusive review we take a look at the new Sun Fire X4140 rack server and see whether it has what it takes to take them on.

This 1U system certainly delivers a good specification for the price as this includes AMD’s latest quad-core ‘Shanghai’ Opterons. Sun is only the second server vendor to supply these processors to us so far – the first being Boston with its remarkable 3000GP. We’ve noticed Dell and HP being very slow to respond to requests for server review samples with these new processors.

The smaller 2.5in. SFF hard disks are rapidly becoming the drive of choice for low profile rack servers and the X4140 has room for no less than eight across its front panel. HP’s ProLiant DL365 G5 only has room for six internal SFF drives whilst Dell’s PowerEdge SC1435 can’t manage more than a pair of 3.5in. drives.

I remain a fan of the 1u server, it’s great to see the vendors continue to improve them as a platform. They’ve changed dramatically since the olden days when you’d get two hard drives, two cpus and a network card. With multi-core processors, these newer smaller drives, lights out and improved memory support, the 1u is becoming a good enough mainstream candidate for a range of uses, from a web/file or exchange server.

Althought we’ve seen many a blade vendor improve the functionality and the affordability of blades as a platform (just look at HP’s BladeSystem C3000) or IBM’s BladeCenter S), not everyone needs (or feels) the need for a rack of blade servers. Particularly if you take a great target market, the small accountant/doctor’s surgery which might need to run a database and say an email application, store a few documents. This target market (if deployed in the right way) might find a 1u box the ideal solution for their business – let’s not forget, it’s all about what’s appropriate for you and your business, everything else is just noise.

I can certainly understand one of the guys I’d been speaking with who had recently switched from DL380’s to DL360’s simply as they were more space efficient and put it “they’re just good enough, unless a team can justify a bigger box, that’s our standard configuration”. Well done to Sun, do check out the review or Sun for more information.

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