The Sun Fire X4275 Server comes in for some generous praise in Dave Mitchell's review for ITPro, from whom it receives four out of six stars as a solution eminently qualified for duty in such storage-hungry applications such as multimedia, data warehousing and video surveillance, given its 12 TB and 24 TB SATA drive configurations.

The X4275 supports its 12 storage bays by wiring the card through to the drive backplane, which has an integral SAS expander, Mitchell points out, adding that the server also supports 3.5-inch SSDs though with a number of limitations: SSDs require full power at system initialization but the initial power surge that occurs during power up limits you to eight 32GB SSDs.

The dozen SATA drives in the front panel of the Sun Fire X4275 give it an edge over the 16-SFF-drive HP ProLiant G6 DL380 and the 8-SFF-drive Dell PowerEdge R710.

Mitchell was pleased with the easy access the hinged cabinet lid provides to the 12 hot-swap fans in the X4275 and the neatly placed 2.53GHz E5540 Xeon processors, as well as the nine DIMM sockets and the 12GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 memory in the product he reviewed.

While the internal USB port and CompactFlash card slot useful for booting an embedded hypervisor under the lid of the X4275 found favor with Mitchell, he did note that both Dell and HP offer an embedded SD memory card slot instead. The X4275 certainly has room to grow with demand as it has three riser cards at the back, offering a total of six PCI-Express 2.0 slots, he points out.

One of the PCI-e slots in the Sun Fire X4275, the reviewer notes, is occupied by a RAID controller, which is based on Adaptec's RAID 5805 adapter. It offers a pair of 4-channel SAS/SATA ports, has a 1.2GHz dual-core ROC (RAID on Chip) plus 256MB of DDR2 cache memory and the battery backup pack as well.

The networking capability of the X4275 comes from its four embedded Gigabit ports. Power redundancy is also on the cards as the server came with both 1050W hot-plug supplies included in the price, Mitchell observes. With the server hooked up to an inline power meter it was reasonably easy on the utility supply.

Mitchell measured the X4275's appetite for power in standby as drawing 14W and with Windows Server 2003 R2 idling along this rose to 180W. With SiSoft Sandra pummeling all 16 logical cores the reviewer found a peak draw of 314W. This compared to a Dell PowerEdge R710 with a very similar spec pulling 16W in standby, 150W in idle and only 270W under load.

The Sun Fire X4275 is also a candidate for general remote server administration, given its embedded Sun ILOM (integrated lights out management) chip, which presents a dedicated Fast Ethernet port at the rear. Its secure web interface opens with a status report on all critical components and their condition. Tables are provided showing the values for all voltages, temperatures and fan speeds, and predefined alert thresholds are applied to each one, according to Mitchell.

The ILOM provides useful full remote control and virtual media services as standard, whereas they are pay-extra options on HP and Dell. Mitchell tested the remote control tools in loading an OS on the review system, but the X4275 only has two USB ports and no room for an optical drive at the front. Run locally with a USB optical drive would limit users to keyboard input only but the KVM-over-IP service avoided these problems.

The power monitoring features of the Sun Fire X4275 allow users to see current power, the permitted maximum load and available power. Users can also get a power history table but, unlike HP’s iLO2 chip and its Power Meter upgrade, there are no nice graphs, writes Mitchell.

In sum, Mitchell observes that Sun can’t match HP, IBM or Dell for general systems management tools as its optional xVM Ops Center software suite is only really aimed at managing Sun servers. With HP, for example, users get its Insight Control Edition (ICE) software as standard, which provides the facilities for managing and monitoring a range of network devices including servers.

The review concludes that the Sun Fire X4275 puts forward a strong proposition as a storage server as it has a high potential capacity and plenty of room to expand. Its build quality is good, and it comes with a solid three-year on-site warranty. Plus, its power consumption isn’t excessive either.

More Information

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