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Sun packs big bang in tiny 2U Intel 7300 16-core server

One of the servers previewed at Intel's Caneland/Tigerton launch yesterday was Sun's full-blown 4-socket 16-core Intel Xeon MP 7300 series server.  What was unique about this server is the fact that it was the only 2U server shown yesterday with all the amenities you'd expect from a high-end 4-socket server to make an ex-IT guy like me blush.
Written by George Ou, Contributor
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One of the servers previewed at Intel's Caneland/Tigerton launch yesterday was Sun's full-blown 4-socket 16-core Intel Xeon MP 7300 series server.  What was unique about this server is the fact that it was the only 2U server shown yesterday with all the amenities you'd expect from a high-end 4-socket server to make an ex-IT guy like me blush.  All the other servers from HP, IBM, Dell, Fujitsu, Lenovo were all 4U in size.

It comes with dual TCP offloading enabled gigabit NIC cards, redundant power supplies, and 32 DIMM slots for up to 256 GBs of memory capacity (128 GB is more realistic now since 8 GB DIMMs are priced out of this world for now).  In the image above, you can see the hand holding the memory tray that holds 32 DIMMs which neatly sits on top of the 4 record-breaking "Tigerton" 7300 CPUs.  Sitting in front the CPU and memory bank are two rows of redundant cooling fans which are hot-serviceable.

You get an optical drive in the front along with 8 hot-swap SAS 2.5" hard drives that can be configured for up to RAID Level 6 though you'll most likely want to configure it for four independent mirrored sets of RAID Level 1.  Having all that redundant storage at your disposal means you can safely store the hard drive images for the 128 virtual guest machines you'll be hosting on this virtualization monster.  I noticed an internal USB port on the motherboard so there should be the potential to plug in a USB memory stick that can be used to boot a dedicated Virtual Machine Hypervisor.

Because you won't be able to hot-migrate Virtual Machines off of a server that is hosting the virtual hard drive images locally, you're going to want a pair of these servers and make sure you have an instance of your application across both servers.  Virtual Machine hot-migration requires the virtual hard drives to be stored on a separate SAN (Storage Area Network).  While hot-migration brings additional robustness and flexibility, it does add complexity and you need to make sure that your SAN is physically AND logically redundant.  If the SAN hosted hot-migration model of Virtualization is your cup of tea, Sun (as well as HP and IBM) has a blade version of a 4-socket 7300 series server.

Note: A colleague of mine told me that his office suffered a long and nasty outage when their SAN died and all of their Virtual Machines went down because they all lost their virtual hard drives.

Of course this type of server isn't just limited to Virtualization hosting; it's an ideal machine for SAP, OLTP (Online Transaction Processing), Java Enterprise server, or web hosting.  The Intel 7300 series platform broke records for all of these server disciplines in a four socket configuration and Sun has shown that they're able to move beyond the realm of SPARC and do it with competence.  While I haven't had a firsthand review of the server to give it a definite recommendation, I must say that I was impressed by the form-factor and design of Sun's latest Intel server.

On an interesting note, Sun's latest Intel x86/x64 server is nearly triple (2.73 times) the speed of Sun's recently launched UltraSPARC T2 server on SPECint_rate2006 peak.  I haven't seen final pricing yet but I would guess that they both end up in the same price range.

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