Sun Fire V40z: Four Opterons in a 3U

Final Thoughts

Sun obviously gave us a lot of data to digest here. We took a look at a piece of hardware that truly has a few competitors; HP’s ProLiant DL585 seems to be the only remotely Tier 1 solution – and not surprisingly, pricing out a similar setup as the one that we tested today from Sun, which was well over $22,000. Second Tier competitors like ASA and Appro are able to provide solutions based on similar specifications, but even those readily approach $20,000 without half the management or PCI-X options. Furthermore, Sun provides the smallest implementation of any of these quad Opteron servers in a 3U form; the ProLiant DL585 comes in 4U form only. There are many more small differences between each server, but we took the time to illustrate the design wins and flaws of just the Sun Fire V40z in this analysis; HP and Appro will have to wait for another day.

Sun has a speed daemon on their hands, and they know it. Sun was very quick to announce the next generation V40z (4 x Opteron 852, 8GB PC-3200) that set more than half a dozen performance records at LinuxWorld last week. With only a single server running on four of the 130nm Opterons in this review, it’s difficult for us to judge Sun’s performance on the market as a whole. However, the enthusiastic approach to Linux coupled with high quality design and management already assure that Sun has won the battle to most, without even raising a finger for benchmarks. In the world of High Power, High Availability computing, stability and features go much further than a 1% boost in performance.

As far as stability goes, we know that the Sun Fire V40z is certainly best of breed. Between the Motorola Service Processor, dedicated out-of-band management network, redundant 760W power supplies and hot swappable active cooling, it becomes real hard for us to determine a single point of failure that could cripple a server. The seven featured PCI-X expansion slots are also a great addition to the feature portfolio of the V40z, even if Sun (and we) recommend that the seventh PCI adaptor goes unused.

Things are just starting to get really interesting at Sun, and at AMD. Sun’s Galaxy 8-way Opteron servers will soon be upon us, but in the meantime, we are already hearing about V40z configurations with dual core Opterons. Obviously, a dual core V40z – which is already dual core ready – will give Sun the only 3U, 8-way Opteron that we’ve heard of. Between dual core Opterons and continual improvements on the 90nm Opteron steppings, server administrators have a lot to look forward to this year.