InfoWorld's Paul Venezia recently reviewed the Sun FireTM X4200 server, and according to his assessment of this next generation of x64 servers from Sun, the entry-level server is almost near perfect. "Although it’s not a bull’s-eye, it’s not far off the mark....," he deduces.

Venezia compliments the Sun Fire X4200 server's split-case design that places its power supplies off to the side so that the disk heat does not cross the mainboard.

Describing its power, which can handle two Opteron 200-series CPUs, leveraging AMD-8000 series chipset and HyperTransport technology, Venezia notes it provides a fast path between the CPUs and RAM. Overall, the Sun Fire X4200 is capable of handling up to 16 GB of DDR400 ECC RAM, 8 GB per CPU. Kudos are given to Sun for color-coding the RAM slots to assist in proper RAM installation and for providing RAM fault indicator LEDs on each bank to help identify a bad DIMM.

The reviewer cites the Fujitsu 2.5-inch 10,000 RPM SAS drives being controlled by an LSI SAS1064 controller that can handle as much as 3 Gbps to each disk, and provides RAID functions. "I’ve never been a fan of LSI RAID chipsets, but it appears to do the job," Venezia writes, "although drivers may be hard to come by if you’re running a non-Sun supported Linux variant. Installing Windows will require a driver floppy - but there’s no floppy drive in the server."

Another aspect of the Sun Fire X4200 server Venezia approved of is its ILOM that provides SNMP, web and CLI-based server management via a dedicated 10/100 Ethernet interface.

He performed several real-world challenges, including web-serving and file-serving tasks, and found the Sun Fire X4200 performed well, largely holding its own in all categories. "In the static Web test, I ran ab benchmarks against the X4200 running Apache 2.0, serving Sun’s own front page, including all images, and came away with an average of 2,100 requests per second," he reports. "In the SSL tests, I ran sslswamp against Apache with a fairly well-tweaked SSL configuration and came away with an average of 405 operations per second, which is quite good, especially when compared to a pre-tweak average of 25 operations per second."

An area that didn't meet his expectations was the file-serving tests via Samba running with SolarisTM 10 Operating System on this Sun server, and nbench smbtorture tests driven from another server. According to Venezia's test, the throughput averaged around 18 MBps that he attributes to the single 2.5-inch disk in the Sun Fire X4200. "If a RAID5 array were available within the X4200, or the tests were run with disk served via SAN, I expect the numbers would have been significantly higher," he believes.

Labeling the Sun Fire X4200 server as just off the bull-eye's mark, the InfoWorld writer is not particularly pleased with the server's limitation of its RAID controller, which offers RAID1 or RAID0, and other things. He states, "The I/O subsystem is lacking in RAID5 support, for instance, and although hardly unique to this server, one of the 2.5-inch SAS drives died during a test."

He concludes, "A better disk I/O subsystem would complete the picture, but even with that caveat, the X4200 is an attractive, solid workhorse server and a good value for the money." [...read more...]

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