System News for Sun Users - The Blog

Portfolio Adds New Technologies to Price List

The Sun Partner Advantage Program for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) has some new development hardware offerings that include Sun Ultra 27 Assemble to Order (ATO); Sun Fire X2270, X4170 X4270, and X4275 Servers ATO; standard configurations for the Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000, T5120, T5140, T5220, and T5240 Servers; among others. As part of this program, qualified Sun partners are able to purchase products, such as these, at discounted rates.

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Noted as Impressive Entries into the Nehalem-based Server Market

The Sun Fire X2270 and X4270 servers “… are the fastest x64 servers Sun has ever produced,” writes Paul Venezia in his InfoWorld review. He states that both models are impressive entries into the Nehalem-based server market and would like to see them survive the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.

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Embedded into New Sun Platforms Complete with Network and Serial Ports

Integrated Lights Out Management (ILOM) is system management firmware that is preinstalled on some Sun servers that enables users to actively manage and monitor components installed in the server. ILOM provides a browser-based interface and a command-line interface, as well as SNMP and IPMI interfaces. The latest version is 3.0 and its been updated in its security, scalability, User Interface (UI) performance, power monitoring, serviceability and system administration and management from the previous 2.0 version.

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Also New: 8 GB DIMMs for Sun Fire X2270 Servers

Increase performance per watt by up to 34% from quad-core AMD Opteron processors with the new six-core processors in the Sun Fire X4140, X4240 and X4440 servers. The six cores provide better performance and power efficiency when running multi-threaded applications, and the AMD Opteron processors incorporate HyperTransport Technology Assist (HT Assist) and Coherent HyperTransport 3.0 Technology (cHT3) - all of which help boost performance. Additionally, Sun is offering 8 GB DIMMs as an option for Sun Fire X2270 servers.

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Pits SSDs Against HDDs

“Sun Fire X2270 MSC/Nastran Vendor_2008 Benchmarks,” an article in the Sun Performance and Best Practice series, reports on the results of the I/O intensive MSC/Nastran Vendor_2008 benchmark test suite, which was used to compare the performance on a Sun Fire X2270 server when using SSDs internally instead of HDDs. The effect on performance from increasing memory to augment I/O caching was also examined.

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Short Items of Interest on Sun Servers

• Tape Library on Logical Domains on a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240
• Sun Fire X2270 Cluster Fluent Benchmark Results
• Sun SSD Server Platform Bandwidth and IOPS (Speeds & Feeds)
• The Future for SSD, Flash Technology
• Comparison of Sun Volume Servers Product Line
• Sun x86 SNMP Hardware Monitoring Agent
• Sun Installation Assistant (SIA) 2.2.16.0
• 300GB SAS Disk Drives Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000/M5000 Servers
• Memcached on Sun X2270

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Includes Lustre, Sun Fire Servers’ Firmware, HPC ClusterTools and More

Have you downloaded the latest updates in Sun software for your Sun solutions? Take a look at the top ten updates made available June 17th through June 23rd. These include Lustre 1.8.0.1; Sun Fire X4540, X2270, X4170, X4270, X4275; Sun Servers Integration 1.0; HPC ClusterTools 8.2; HPC Software, OpenSolaris Developer Edition 1.0; Sun Blade X6275; and Sun Server Hardware Management Pack 1.1.

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Commercial Grade Support at a Lower Cost

Using a test configuration consisting of 1 x Sun/Intel Nehalem-based X2270 server for the GlassFish application server and 1 x Sun Fire X4170 Intel Nehalem-based server for the MySQL 5.1 database, Sun set new performance and price/performance leadership marks on SPECjAppServer2004 2925.18, reports blogger Tom Daly. These results were attained with an all open-source stack including GlassFish, MySQL and OpenSolaris on these Sun/Intel servers using ZFS.

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A Mixed Review but One that Finds Positive Attributes

In his ITPro review of the Sun Fire X2270 Server, Dave Mitchell finds a Nehalem-based, powerful 1U rack server that offers some unusual storage features. It earned four out of a possible six stars with its hardware spec and value winning Mitchell’s praise, while its high operational noise level and thirst for power garnered criticism.

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Powerful Enough for Large-scale HPC/Grid Computing and Web Infrastructure Deployments

The Sun Fire X2270 is an x64 entry-level HPC server that is fast, expandable, and energy-efficient and runs Solaris, Linux, Windows and VMware operating systems. With Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, the Sun Fire X2270 server delivers 32-bit and 64-bit performance in rack-mountable 1RU form factor.

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