The glowing review of the Sun Fire X4170 in PC Pro by Dave Mitchell cites little to find fault with in Sun's Xeon-5570 powered processors, allowing that there is merit in the claim that the X4170 holds its own against competing 4U solutions. This level of performance, he notes, comes with a TDP of 95 watts while also supporting Hyper-Threading and Turbo-Boost. He adds that the 5570s support memory speeds up to 1,333MHz and have the highest speed QPI of 6.4GT/sec. The storage capabilities of the X4170 met with Mitchell's approval as it supports up to eight 2.5in SFF hard disks. Sun offers SAS, SATA and SSD variants, and the hot-swap bays are arranged neatly across the front panel so as to leave enough room for a SATA DVD drive, a pair of USB ports and plenty of operational status indicators.

Mitchell notes that this storage potential puts the X4170 on a par with HP's ProLiant DL360 G6, but is better than the A-Listed Dell PowerEdge R610, which has room for six. Naturally, RAID is on the menu with a controller mounted in one of three PCI Express slots.

He adds that the card is based on Adaptec's RAID 5805 adapter, which has its pair of four-channel internal SAS/SATA ports both wired to the drive backplane. It offers top performance with a 1.2GHz dual-core ROC (RAID on Chip), supported by 256MB of DDR2 cache memory. Plenty of array options are on offer, including RAID6 and 60, and you also get the battery backup pack included. Under the hood, things also found favor with Mitchell.

No slouch when it comes to virtualization, the server has an internal USB port and a CompactFlash card slot for booting an embedded hypervisor, Mitchell notes, adding that both Dell and HP have gone a step further, since their 1U rack servers offer an embedded SD memory card slot instead.

Three PCI Express 2 slots, one occupied by the RAID card, provide the X4170 with room to expand. The first to embed four Gigabit ports into rack servers, Sun set the trend now emulated by the PowerEdge R610, Mitchell points out.

Seven hot-plug modules, each containing pairs of dual rotor fans, perform cooling duty for the X4170. The DL360 G6 only requires four modules in a dual-processor configuration, while the PowerEdge R610 uses six. Mitchell concedes that the X4170 isn't as quiet as HP and Dell, but noise levels aren't excessive.

A pair of 760W hot-plug supplies provide power redundancy. With both supplies linked to an inline meter the reviewers measured 20W in standby and 182W with Server 2003 R2 in idle. Using SiSoft Sandra to push the 16 logical cores to the maximum a peak was recorded at 355W.

As one might expect, the X4170 can be remotely managed, as the motherboard provides Sun's embedded ILOM (integrated lights out management) chip, which uses a dedicated Fast Ethernet port at the rear. This provides full KVM over IP services, allowing the server to be controlled regardless of its condition - so as long as you have power you have access, Mitchell elaborates.

While he says that Sun can't match HP, Dell and IBM for general systems management, he explains that this is a result of Sun's view that it won't be top dog in the datacenter and will have its servers managed by another vendors' software. Its xVM Ops Center software suite is designed only to manage its own servers and costs extra.

Finally, Mitchell writes, the X4170 undoubtedly delivers a choice specification in a well-built package. However, in the 1U rack server space it's up against the A-Listed PowerEdge R610, which offers better value, a number of innovative design features and superior server management tools.

More Information

Sun's New Family of Servers Based on Intel Xeon 5500 Processor Series [...read more...]

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