ZDNet's Craig Simms critiques Sun's x64 media and storage server, offering his view of its external and internal design, specs and performance.

External and Internal Design

The 2RU Xeon 5500 series server has 12 quick-release 3.5-inch drive bays. Diagnostic lights on some of the drive sleds offers quick-look determination of failure. Quick removable fan units (two banks of six) contain their own redundant fan. No latch required. However, Simms mentions, just one fan cannot be removed by itself since two are attached to each quick removable module.

Specs

Simms details the Sun supplied server ZDNet received as: two Xeon E5540 "Gainestown" CPUs clocked at 2.53GHz with four physical cores apiece; hyperthreading-aware OS capable of handling 16 threads; three 2GB PC3-8500 RAM sticks per CPU for 12GB system RAM with timings of 7:7:7:20:1T (Note: there is 18 RAM slots total, supporting a maximum of 144GB RAM).

In this section of the review, Simms also discusses the internals including the motherboards, daughterboards, ports, drives, etc. Pictures accompany the review for a first-hand visual look at the server.

Performance

Honestly commenting that many factors can affect an assessment in this area of review, Simms lists "a few 'canned' CPU-based benchmarks" on the Xeon 5500 architecture including:

• Cinebench R10, 1 CPU with a result of 3641CB
• Cinebench R10, 16 CPU = 24210CB
• STARS Euler3d CFD, 16 threads = 5.857Hz
• wPrime 32M = 6.02s
• wPrime 1024M = 144.581s

Conclusion

Suitable for small-to-medium businesses, the Sun Fire X4275 is an excellent all-rounder that can be fit with custom specifications.

"Whether you need to apply yourself with some dense storage or just need the compute power of 16 cores, its flexibility is commendable," Simms surmises. "It's not the quietest server around, but stuck in a server room no one is likely to notice."

For full details of all these aspects of the Sun Fire X4275, see Simms complete review on ZDNet.

This Sun server can be had starting at US$3,645. It also qualifies under the Sun Try and Buy program, which allows for a 60-day free trial.

More Information

Sun Fire X4275 Server - Sun product page

Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series

Sun Fire X4275 Sets Performance Record with Sybase IQ TPC-H 1000GB

Sun's New Family of Servers Based on Intel Xeon 5500 Processor Series

Solaris Cluster Support for New Sun Fire Servers [...read more...]

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