Awesome new RubyForge hardware
Last fall I posted about some sweet new hardware that Sun had sent us. Well, they've outdone themselves this time - they sent us both a T5120 and an X4500 with 24 TB (yup, I had "GB" here at first, doh!) of storage. Great scott! Wow, does that X4500 weigh a ton.
Pictures are below.... and I'll post more details on the uses of these machines as we get them set up. Thanks Sun!!
The T5120
The X4500
Sweeeeeeeeeeet! :)
Posted by: dennis | March 14, 2008 at 04:32 PM
I guess it's 16 *TB* instead of 16 GB. Very nice indeed
Posted by: zimbatm | March 14, 2008 at 05:00 PM
I really hope that - as big as that X4500 is - it has more than "16 GB of storage"!
Posted by: Jason L Perry | March 14, 2008 at 05:11 PM
The thumper (X4500) only comes in 12 TB, 36 TB, 24 TB or 48 TB capacities.
Posted by: trever | March 14, 2008 at 05:44 PM
Unless you meant 16GB of ram. Yes, they do come with that.
Posted by: trever | March 14, 2008 at 05:46 PM
Holy crap, they sent you a thumper!?
Nice!
Posted by: Jonathan Ellis | March 15, 2008 at 01:38 AM
'16 GB of storage'? That's right up there with an iPhone. Seriously though, x4500 can be configured between 250GB and 48TB. From your photo, I'm guessing you got the 16TB model.
I have mixed feelings about the Txxxx line. The T5120 isn't too bad, as it has 8 FPU's, but the T2000 can be pokey with only one FPU. It targeted to be a web server, and in theory you shouldn't need the FPUs on a web server. Also, the onboard crypto should remove much of the need for FP math. My experience has been that some applications run well on the Txxxx hardware, while others are very slow. Without profiling, it's hard to tell if your apps are making fp calls. Basic stuff like converting numbers to string can often involve floating point calculations. The x4500, with it's general purpose x86 CPU's can handle just about any type of application you through at it, whether it's a DB, file server, or web server.
Of course, if Sun were to give me a server, I'd be happy to take it. However, I don't think I could afford to electric bill for the x4500.
In theory, AMD's next gen quad core CPU is going to be socket compatible with the existing dual core CPU's. I'd love to be able to double the CPU power of some existing x4600 servers just by swapping out the CPUs. Currently, the only quad core x64 CPUs Sun has are the Intel Xeons.
I assume your going to run Linux on both hosts? Here's two reasons to run Solaris:
T5120 - More community support for Solaris Sparc than any Linux on Sparc IMHO.
X4500 - ZFS. ZFS is built for handling terabytes of data, but it has lots of cool features like snapshotting. Yes, I think there's a project porting ZFS to Linux, but do you want to put your 16 GB of data on a development file system?
Posted by: Brian Egge | March 15, 2008 at 07:52 AM
A whole 16G? Wow, using those newfangled 3GB hard disks? ;)
How are you going to make use of them alongside your existing hardware? Do you actually have enough concurrency to make good use of that T2? We found the T1 a bit sluggish for web app stuff, but very nice for overall throughput if you could actually keep all the cores busy.
Posted by: Thomas Hurst | March 15, 2008 at 01:28 PM
Did you really mean 16 Gigabytes? That's awfully small in this day and age.
Posted by: suraj | March 15, 2008 at 01:54 PM
all - yes, I meant TB, doh!!
Posted by: tomcopeland | March 24, 2008 at 10:50 PM