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TECHREVIEWLast of theIt’s unclear exactly how the Sun willset this month or what Oracle will bedoing with the hardware side of Sun.Will Sun servers soon get a coat of OracleRed and an “Unbreakable” stamp?Whatever happens, it seems that Oraclewill be inheriting a hardware engineer- The new Sun Fire X2270 and Sun FireX4270 servers are the fastest x64 serversSun has ever produced.The Sun X2270 is a low-cost, 1U rackX4270 is the X2270’s big brother, a 2Usystem starting at $3,445. Both servers X2270 packs a lot of compute powerin a somewhat constrained chassis, theX4270 offers slightly more power in a-Deployment optionsThe quick skinny: The X2270 would doextremely well as a front-end Web server,a small database server, or a member of avirtualization farm, with the addition of a bays, but the low cost offsets these limita-Sun serversSun’s fast and cheap Nehalem-powered Sun Fire X2270 and Sun FireX4270 promise to put some sizzle into Oracle’s hardware businessBy Paul Venezia, InfoWorld (US)tions, depending on the application.The X4270 is the best of both worlds, of-cantexpansion opportunities and a wealthof local disk options. This is a shoe-in fora database server, application server, storageserver, or basically anything you canthrow at it. With the ability to house morethan 2.3TB locally across sixteen 146GBpower, and six expansion slots, there’slittle that this box can’t handle.Virtual test benchTo test each server, I opted for my signedto mimic a large, database-drivenWeb application, using a randomizedmix of dynamic and static page delivery.- Web servers run a tweaked Apache 2.2Web server, with content mounted on anNFS share to the database server. Thedatabase server runs a highly tweaked the Web root to the front-end servers. Allload balancing is handled by Nginx, run-purpose, in order to eclipse the eightphysical cores present in the serversunder test. Also, the static/dynamic callratio, though randomized, is seededto bring all boxes to a maximum load internal vSwitch, with only the load balancerdirectly linking to the lab network.All load generation was driven from ab,the Apache benchmarking tool, running100,000 requests per test pass, 20 concurrentconnections.Slim and speedy 46 Computerworld Hong Kong Sept 2009 www.cw.com.hk
TECHREVIEWpactFlashcard with ESXi, slide it intothe slot, and boot the server as a diskless also be achieved with the X2270, albeitwith the use of the internal USB port, notLike its smaller sibling, the X4270 of-and several external USB ports. Alsolike the X2270, the X4270 performs ex-tingup numbers marginally better thanthe X2270.but short on most other assets. In keepingwith the Nehalem design, it can address 3.5-inch SATA drive bays up front, twoGigabit Ethernet ports rather than the“normal” four that most Sun servers can-600W power supply. It does include thefull graphical support out of the box.In the lab, the X2270 moved like amuch more expensive system. I did twoon a single 500GB SATA drive, then an-share to a SAS array run from an AdaptecSnap Server 650. The difference wasnoticeable and resulted in a performanceincrease of around 15 percent. With thesingle local disk against a RAID 5 ar-surprising. In fact, applications that aremore disk I/O intensive should show aneven greater performance increase.There’s lots of power in this littlepackage. The only downsides are thetwo Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, ratherthan Sun’s normal allotment of four, andthe lack of a redundant power option.In many applications, a server like thiswill need more than two Ethernet interfaces,and redundant power is always aplus. But for raw cost/performance, theX2270 is a very good deal.Big on the insideThe X4270 uses 2.5-inch SAS, SATA,or solid-state drives instead of 3.5-inchSATA drives, allowing Sun to pack 16hot-swap drive bays into its 2U chassis.It’s almost out of necessity that theX4270 also has an integrated RAID controllerthat can handle RAID levels 0, 1,5, 10, and 50.The X4270 also bumps up the maxi- X2270’s supply of Gigabit Ethernet interfaceswith a total of four. It also ex- this expansion bus, the X4270 has an in-Will Sun servers soonget a coat of Oracle Redand an “Unbreakable”stamp?This says more about the X2270 thanthe X4270. While they’re both very goodexamples of Intel’s Nehalem processorarchitecture, the low-end X2270 canhold its own with its pricier brethren.Both models are impressive entriesinto the Nehalem-based server market.Sun’s x64-based hardware has beensuperlative for the past few years, andthese new servers are the latest in a lineof solid server platforms. Leveragingthe surprising power of the Nehalem just about anywhere —assuming thatOracle’s acquisition of Sun doesn’trock the boat.It’s too bad that so many questionssurround Oracle’s takeover. Sun hasbeen putting out extremely inexpensive,feature-rich, and solid x64 servers forquite some time, and it’s a shame thatthe future of Sun’s hardware productionis uncertain. Note to Oracle: Sun’s hardwaredevelopment is doing very well—no need to make any changes. www.cw.com.hkSept 2009 Computerworld Hong Kong 47
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