I work at Sun because I like computers, so whenever we announce some, that’s a big day for me. Today’s iron is built around Nehalem. There are a couple of blades, a bunch of rack-mounts, plus 10GE and Infiniband switches (I have seen more than one internal Ethernet-vs-Infiniband fistfight; juicy stuff for geeks. My personal bet is on Ethernet). There will be tons of press releases and so on starting at the Sun homepage linked above, but for the real poop you need bloggers; the people who built these boxes and ran the benchmarks. Tushar Katarki has aggregated them in Sun rise over Nehalem. Let’s cut Tushar some slack on the cheerleading, he’s been working on these for a while and has earned the right to a little rah-rah; and he links to real bloggers.
It’s called an X4270
As for me, I look at the pictures and think “Damn, they’re ugly.” I look at the specs and benchmarks and think “On the evidence, ugly is good.” I mean, you wouldn’t want to spend much time in the kind of room where they deploy this kind of thing. But you might want to roll a few in if you’re burning lotsa x86 cycles, and especially if you’re already pumping out too much carbon.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Simon Fell (Apr 14 2009, at 08:38)
Need all those drive bays given the largest disk you can put in it is a piddling 146Gb.
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From: David Magda (Apr 14 2009, at 14:43)
If you think Sun's systems are ugly on the outside, check out some of the competition that has similar specs (e.g., HP DL370), and compare. (And then look at the URL for their product page, and compare it to the Sun URL.) Fitting sixteen externally accessible disks into a system is quite a challenge.
If you can get access, also pop one open and look at the internal layout. A good place to start is where the power supplies plug in internally, and then how the juice travels around. Tearing apart a Sun system can be quite fun (as long as you're not experiencing downtime).
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From: Michael Fox (Apr 17 2009, at 06:10)
Who cares what it looks like, as long as it performs.
At the end of the day it sits in a data center, and probably is only seen when someone has to come replace something. Other then that, its probably just seen to have flashing lights in a darken environment.
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From: Eddie (Apr 20 2009, at 06:02)
> I work at Sun because ...
And today you work for Oracle.
Congratulations!
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From: Robert Young (Apr 20 2009, at 07:51)
>> And today you work for Oracle.
Well, what is Oracle's history? The run of the mill experience in the industry is to lop off the parts the acquirer doesn't want. Oracle wants MySql. It may want java. Larry hasn't been keen on cloudy stuff. Not sure how he feels about other things xml.
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From: Giacomo (Apr 20 2009, at 21:46)
Oracle loves all the tech it can integrate, look at Sleepycat.
Larry mostly wanted Java and some big iron to run dedicated db appliances, plus control (not death) of MySQL. I don't think Tim has to worry.
The big loser in the Bray-verse will probably be NetBeans, unless a revolution happens JDeveloper gets replaced (it would be a big effort). Interesting times :)
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