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Is the Sun Microsystems’ SunFire X2100m2 the way forward for hosting servers?

June 30th, 2008

We don’t usually talk much about what equipment we use because as a company we are much more focused on the service but behind each of our system administrators is great hardware.

Although slightly less heard of than some of the more mass market brands, Sun Microsystems have always been the kings of supercomputing and more recently mid-market servers. Their SunFires range which use x86 AMD processors play a core role within both our infrastructure and the majority of our client solutions. The fact that they work on x86 chips means that we can use them with Windows, Linux, VMWare, XenOS or Solaris which I’ll get onto later.

What we really like about the Suns is that they have actually thought about how they are built, from the rackrails to the Intergrated Lights Out Management (iLOM) which allows full remote keyboard, video, mouse and mounting of remote drives to the fact that the cases don’t have any sharp edges to hurt us with, they even come with drive caddys if you don’t order drives with them. Unlike some other providers they always come with the same chips rather than a pick and mix of the cheapest available at the time. Another particularly tasty feature is the four network ports that they come with, one might ask why anyone would need that many but I can assure you that we legitimately use all of them.

On the performance & reliability side they have been designed from first principles there’s very little internally that can go wrong with them. They are very happy at being virtualised and indeed this is the way forwards for the ‘green’ datacentres of the future. They’re even future proof for the next generation of AMD quad core processors, the x2100s will take a comfy 8GB of memory on basic models and 32GB on the x2200 range.

Finally Solaris, Suns own made open source operating system. It is much less known than Linux or Windows but recently Sun have been making a big push to get it stable and working on x86 systems. One great benefit is the ZFS file system, which is particularly good for its ‘storage pools’ which allows the creation of partitions/file systems without having to set a fixed size. This is particularly useful if you are not sure of how much space you might need and don’t want to be locked into traditional partitions.

Sun have been very active recently in the web 2.0 arena with their Sun Start-up Essentials program which aims to help out startups by connecting them with the right people and offering some good deals too.

If you have any questions get in touch and we’ll go through how our fully managed server hosting ties in with the above!

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