Five out of six stars and the comment that the Sun Fire X4140 is one classy 1U rack server that has more of everything than the competition and is very competitively priced is the verdict pronounced by PC Pro's Dave Mitchell on this Sun solution. In Mitchell's assessment, with the Sun Fire X4140, Sun has come up with a server that will give both Dell and HP some serious competition at the lower end of the server market.

Several features impressed the author, one being the inclusion of AMD's latest quad-core "Shanghai" Opteron processors, making Sun only the second server vendor to supply these processors.

Further, the fact that the X4140 has room for eight of the smaller 2.5 inch SFF hard disks across its front panel struck Mitchell as a good thing, given that HP's ProLiant DL365 G5 has room for only six internal SFF drives, and Dell's PowerEdge SC1435 can accommodate no more than a pair of 3.5 inch drives.

The author was also favorably impressed with the presence of pairs of 2GB DDR2 modules for each processor that can be upgraded to 128GB. Equally impressive in Mitchell's view was the 1.2GHz dual-core ROC (RAID on Chip) supported by 256MB of DDR2 cache memory. It supports plenty of array types right up to RAID-6 and -60, and comes with the battery backup pack included.

The reviewer points out that the X4140 features three easily accessible PCI-e slots at the rear and the price includes both 650W redundant power supplies. Even the network port count is better than the rest, as the server sports a quad of embedded Gigabit ports - virtually all other 1U racks only have two, he writes.

The X4140's fourteen dual rotor fans, mounted as pairs in easily removable hot-swap carriers (and an extra flap in the lid that allows them to be swapped out without taking the server offline) found favor with Mitchell. And, he notes, despite that number of fans, he found the X4140 no louder than IBM's single socket System X3350.

Power management came in for some praise as well, with Mitchell noting that the X4140 performed well in power tests with both supplies linked up to an in-line power meter that showed it drawing only 16W in standby (14W less than HP's quad-core Xeon based ProLiant DL360 G5). Even with Windows Server 2003 R2 pottering along in idle the average draw was only 200W, and with SiSoft Sandra pummelling all eight cores this rose to only 305W - both lower than the DL360.

With Sun's embedded ILOM chip a standard feature of the X4140, remote server management using the full KVM-over-IP services is a welcome possibility that Mitchell points out.

Sun's xVM Ops Center software suite enables general systems management and enables firmware provisioning, inventory, system monitoring and alerting. Mitchell's only reservation was that Sun does not include the software as standard.

Only one thing puzzled Mitchell: "With systems like the Sun Fire X4140 we're baffled as to why Sun is selling more of its industry standard servers. The X4140 packs so much more into its chassis than the rest, it's extremely well built and designed and easily matches HP's ProLiant DL365 G5 on price," he concluded.

More Information

Complete text of Mitchell\'s review

Sun Fire X4140 Server overview

Sun xVM Ops Center [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter