It took 18 months for it to happen, but the hand of Bechtolsheim is about to touch Sun Microsystems. One of the more impressive features of the Becky Boxes is the way components can be replaced. Disk drives can be removed from the front of the system without pulling the box from the server rack and power supplies can be yanked from the back. Administrators can also remove fans by pulling the server only about 10 inches out of a rack. The system will ship in the same chassis as Sun’s upcoming Niagara-based systems.
So it’s just like every other server shipped for the last 10 years? If these are some of the “more impressive features”, they’d better start over.
So it’s just like every other server shipped for the last 10 years? If these are some of the “more impressive features”, they’d better start over.
Read more carfully.
I read and read and still don’t understand what is revolutionary about this…
“Disk drives can be removed from the front of the system without pulling the box from the server rack”
In other words, hotswap…
I agree. How is this different from any genereric Dell rackmount box? A real innovation would be a new hotswap PCI format for 2u servers.
Yeah, sure, and you would for ever whine that SUN wasn’t using open stadards by creating a new PCI connector.
Well, sharing the same chassis as Niagara ain’t small potatoes. Sun is pushing some serious data center iron, here (big-time Opteron, mega-thread Niagara).
Also, some of the leaked info about Galaxy several months ago indicated these boxes will have massive I/O bandwidth for their size (4RU?)
Bechtolsheim designed the best systems back in the day, and it was obvious how excited McNealy was to re-introduce Bechtolsheim as Sun #1 at the start of Galaxy.
What’s the benefit to the customer if some Opteron server shares the same chassis as the Niagara server?
I agree that it would be cool if servers adopted PCI Express SIOM or AMC; too bad those form factors seem to have chicken-and-egg issues.
chicken-and-egg issues.
I was wondering, shouldn’t that ne chicken or egg?
The problem is only one of them was first not both.
“What’s the benefit to the customer if some Opteron server shares the same chassis as the Niagara server?”
Bechtolsheim dropped a hint that the Galaxy system architecture could be applied to both Niagara and Opteron…I’m looking forward to seeing what they show in September to see if this hint had any substance to it.
Hmm, sounds kinda vague – its porbably a ‘keep the chassy, replace the mb and processor’ deal – not exactly something earth shattering.
Something a little more interesting would be SUN using the same motherboards for both their SPARC and AMD processors, so that you can pull out the AMD and replace it with a Niagar or SPARC64 at a later date (or vice versa).
Err.. what’s so great about removing the PSU from the back? Dell let you do it from the front and has for a while. How does a feature like that make headline news? I agree with the first guy, the emphasis of this post is very misplaced.
As far as I can see, the point here isn’t that Sun has come up with anything revolutionary in the design of rackmounts, but rather that it’s the first time they release opteron boxes that has had as much thought put into the design as the sparc kit. It shows how they’re treating opteron as a first-class CPU along with sparc. (How did the design of their earlier opteron kit compare to the sparc versions?)
So this story is more like that guy who won a Mercedes at the lottery an then later it turns out it wasn’t a Mercedes but a bicycle and he did not won it but it was stolen.
Big flames of nothing.
The point is that the article missed the point. Several points actually. First, this is no standard PC platform with Opterons plugged in. The bus-level design is the more important story here. Second, a server comprises both hardware and software. Surely this article should mention whether we’re talking Solaris, Linux, or both on these boxes. Lastly, anyone writing about server hardware should have commented on the possibility of legal issues if they choose to market these boxes as “X Series,” while positioning them as a direct competitor to IBM’s xSeries.
So would it be correct in assuming that they’re using their own chipset and so forth? that would be quite interesting to see.
I’ve seen the Early Access machine (it was the 1U unit, not the 2U) being demonstrated. I think the box physical arrangement of components (2 separated compartment, 4 ‘doors’) have advantage of IBM (I have not seen Dell nor HP), in a sense that service-ability is easier.
On the management part, the remote KVM is also cool. No need to order 40 DVDROM when buying 1 rack-loaded servers.
Are these boxes going to be lower cost value leaders or just fancier big iron for multi-national corporations?
At face value, the listed ‘innovations’ hardly sound like anything new. Sounds like Sun figured out how to make a current technology server using parts that have been standardized in the PC world for years. Bravo ‘Becky’.
What ‘Becky’ needs to do is work on the desktops to make them nice to work with (and still quiet). Now that would be a huge improvement.
mmmm…. hardware!
The point is that with a common component and design system, it saves Sun a heap of money by only having to design one part rather than two. Anybody who saw the Sun Fire uniboard story would realise the benefits of this, and the extra added benefit of having a single person directing the componentry design. One thing that my Sun friends have mentioned in the past is that while the uniboard was a great idea to start with, there was no single uniboard-supremo… and then things started to not be so good. With Bechtolsheim at the design helm again, things are looking up for Sun.
We actually know very little about these servers. Luckily, we have to wait very little to have the real things delivered.
Sun is drumming up great mindshare with Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, but there appears to be more work for them on the hardware front. Most posts above are by people who wouldn’t know the difference between a Dell server and an IBM mainframe (or a tricycle, I bet).
Okay, folks, here’s the trends Sun has been leading the last year or more: 100% open source software stack eventually, managability and virtualization, running head to head with Dell on hardware cost (apples to apples) even without any OEM agreements with Microsoft, performance in many areas, and very inexpensive service contracts.
Blah blah dell can do better blah blah…you all need to look at the bigger picture.
I wouldn’t say they have no idea of the difference a dell server and an ibm mainframe, but at least most of them have not touched a sun server.
Its about time SUN made some smart moves. Opteron is a platform that will take them well into the performance future and provide high qulaity OS and Harware for a lower cost. Now if they could work on their end to end solutions(read: SUN branded cache centric arrays to compete with EMC and HP(Hitachi) then they will be golden.
Actually Sun’s 99XX series arrays are rebranded Hitachi Arrays so from a HW perspective they the same as an XP or Tagma Store… of course now that they bought storage tek I am curious to see where things go on SUN storage side…