Sun Microsystems Sun Fire X4170 review

Underneath the lid is a tidy interior. The pair of Xeons are sited at the front of the motherboard and mounted by solid passive copper heatsinks. Each processor has a dedicated bank of nine DIMM sockets to its side, and the review system included 12GB of DDR3 memory that can be upgraded to a hefty 144GB as soon as 8GB modules are available.

For virtualisation duties, the server has an internal USB port and a CompactFlash card slot for booting an embedded hypervisor. However, both Dell and HP have gone a step further , since their 1U rack servers offer an embedded SD memory card slot instead.

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

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

Power redundancy is provided by a pair of 760W hot-plug supplies, and even with its high specification the X4170 performed well in our power tests. With both supplies linked to our inline meter we measured 20W in standby and 182W with Server 2003 R2 in idle. Using SiSoft Sandra to push the 16 logical cores to the maximum we saw this peak at 355W.

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.

Sun can't match HP, Dell and IBM for general systems management, as it's always taken the view 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.

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.

Author: Dave Mitchell