Apple's New Flagship: Wow, That's a Lot of Power!

[graphic7]

I did take a look at some Sun servers since you're always raving about them, but they were fairly expensive and I'm not familiar with a Sparc architecture, and i didn't want to be surprised. I heard that Solaris 10 supports virtualization out of the box though.

You can buy used hardware from 7-10 years ago off eBay relatively cheaply, nowadays. Last year, I purchased a Sun E4500 /w 8x400MHz UltraSPARC-II procs (8MB of cache/proc for a total of 64MB of cache) and 8GB of memory for $600, along with a Sun StorEdge A5200 (22x18GB 10,000RPM 1Gb/s fibre-channel disks) /w 4x onboard fibre-channel interfaces for an additional $500. Nowadays, you can get a workstation, like a Sun Blade 1000 (2x750MHz UltraSPARC-IIIs) or an Ultra 80 (4x450MHz UltraSPARC-IIs) for pennies. (Here's a few pics -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/85894987@N00/sets/)

And yes, Solaris supports software virtualization out of the box. These are called 'zones' (or 'containers' if you're a marketer) and effectively use the same kernel throughout the system, but offer enough privilege separation between each zone so a user in one zone can't 'peek in' the other zone. This gives zones a high level of performance. Couple this with Solaris's resource management capabilities, like the Fair Share Scheduler, processor sets, and projects, and you can do massive consolidation.

Edit: The E4500 is expandable to 14 procs and 14GB of memory.

 

[-Job-]

Sadly, i need to run at least one Windows server environment for .NET development (Mono is not there yet).
This E4500 is $1,700 without CPUs, RAM and disks. Yours must've been a rare deal.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Sun-Microsystems-E4500-Base-Machine_W0QQitemZ3056921379QQihZ011QQcategoryZ51238QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem

 

[graphic7]

Sadly, i need to run at least one Windows server environment for .NET development (Mono is not there yet).
This E4500 is $1,700 without CPUs, RAM and disks. Yours must've been a rare deal.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Sun-Microsystems-E4500-Base-Machine_W0QQitemZ3056921379QQihZ011QQcategoryZ51238QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem

http://cgi.ebay.com/Sun-Enterprise-4500-w-8x400Mhz-CPU-8-GB-RAM_W0QQitemZ170118128982QQihZ007QQcategoryZ51238QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

You must not do a lot of eBaying.

You won't find one with internal disks, as E4500s are meant to be used with external storage, like my StorEdge A5200. Each IO board supports up to 2 onboard GBICs.

(There are disk boards that you can buy, but these are sleazy, and require the use of one CPU/IO board slot)

Edit: E4500s also have dynamic reconfiguration abilities. You can replace individual CPUs and DIMMs while the system is online.

 

[-Job-]

What do you use yours for? How's performance? What Solaris version are you running? That's cheap enough that I'm considering buying it just because.

 

[graphic7]

What do you use yours for? How's performance? What Solaris version are you running? That's cheap enough that I'm considering buying it just because.

I'm currently using mine as a Sun Ray server (Sun Rays are thin clients sold by Sun which are solid-state devices that have no moving parts -- not even a fan) and an Oracle development server (most of the work I do on the side involves DBA and PL/SQL development). It also serves as my build system for OpenSolaris ON sources (the consolidation of OpenSolaris that contains the kernel, drivers, and the bulk of the userland), as I'm currently improving support for my Tadpole SPARCbook 6500, which requires that I have a build environment that's capable of building ON in a realistic amount of time.

In terms of performance, a single UltraSPARC-II processor will be blown away by any modern x86 processor; however, given a sufficiently multi-threaded workload, my E4500 would compare to any modern x86 processor. I can do an MPlayer build in roughly 2 minutes, as this is important, given I'm also an MPlayer developer (you'll see my name in the AUTHORS and MAINTAINERS files in the MPlayer source tree, because I maintain the MPlayer Solaris and AIX ports). A modern x86 system compiles MPlayer in anywhere from 3-5 minutes.

I'm currently running Solaris Nevada 64a (this is an Alpha release of Solaris 11).

I would hold off on purchasing an E4500 and A5200, unless you're in an area where power is sufficiently cheap. Given I live in Tennessee, which has some of the cheapest power in the entire country, the E4500 and A5200 only add $50 to my power bill/month. You'll also need to worry about cooling, which is very important, especially if you live in a hot and humid region.

If you're still interested in purchasing a SPARC system, I would recommend an Ultra 80 or Blade 1000. These systems can both be purchased for $200-$500 off eBay in loaded configurations. For example, an Ultra 80 /w 4x450MHz UltraSPARC-II procs (4MB cache /proc), 4GB of memory, and at least 2x36.6GB disks or 2x73GB disks should be in this price range.

 

[-Job-]

I'll settle for a Solaris VM to host J2EE apps under Websphere. My current "server" is overheating as it is.

 

[graphic7]

I'll settle for a Solaris VM to host J2EE apps under Websphere. My current "server" is overheating as it is.

You shouldn't have any problem running Solaris 10 or Nevada in VMware; however, I can't guarantee what level of performance you'll receive. As for your current server overheating, I'd make sure you have your fans placed properly throughout the chassis. I have a peecee that tends to run anywhere between 50-60C, but my E4500 rarely gets above 40C (anything about 50C on an E4500 is considered dangerous). This is because the E4500 has its fans placed properly, but its also placed properly in the room, so that air can be sucked in from the right, blown over the CPU heatsinks and memory DIMMs, and then blown out the left side of the chassis.

 

[FulhamFan3]

As a comparison i just purchased a server with two 2.66Ghz quad core CPUs with a 1333Ghz FSB, 8Gb FB RAM and a 15 RPM 150Gb RAID 1 drive configuration and it's considerably less than half of the $12,000 for the Mac Pro. (minimal graphics card though)

Where are you getting that price from? I just went to the apple website and put the same specs as you and it comes up with $5,700.

 

[-Job-]

Someone else in the thread mentioned $12,000. I guess i just took their word for it.

 

[-Job-]

You shouldn't have any problem running Solaris 10 or Nevada in VMware; however, I can't guarantee what level of performance you'll receive. As for your current server overheating, I'd make sure you have your fans placed properly throughout the chassis. I have a peecee that tends to run anywhere between 50-60C, but my E4500 rarely gets above 40C (anything about 50C on an E4500 is considered dangerous). This is because the E4500 has its fans placed properly, but its also placed properly in the room, so that air can be sucked in from the right, blown over the CPU heatsinks and memory DIMMs, and then blown out the left side of the chassis.

I'm having some issues configuring the shorewall firewall in my Solaris installation. I think the Solaris 10 version i installed, which i got a while back, is a desktop version. I don't see the point of having Solaris as anything else other than a server to be honest.

 

[aliaze1]

For my purposes, the Sun Ultra 40 workstation is more suited. I would consider Apple's spec'd out Mac Pro not to be a bad system, but its still not a UNIX workstation, and Apple is not a UNIX vendor. The Ultra 40 seems to be far more expandable (up to 8 internal disks) and Sun is offering some fairly high-end workstation-class level graphics with it (note workstation-class, not PC game workloads, which are texture intensive rather than programmed IO). On top of that, you get HyperTransport, as its AMD-based.

So, if you're in the market for a decent UNIX workstation, rather than a graphics workstation, you might take a look Sun's Ultra 20 and Ultra 40 AMD64 workstations.

http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra40/

Mac OS X is UNIX based, so perhaps a knowledgeable person could tweak the MAC Pro to run UNIX?

 

[Aquafire]

Mac OS X is UNIX based, so perhaps a knowledgeable person could tweak the MAC Pro to run UNIX?

Dead easy.

Aquafire.

 

[las3rjock]

Dead easy.

Agreed, especially since the Open Group has already certified Mac OS X Version 10.5 ("Leopard") as meeting the UNIX 03 standard. The other UNIX 03 certified operating systems are Solaris 10, HP-UX 11i V3, and AIX 5L.

 

[Aquafire]

Agreed, especially since the Open Group has already certified Mac OS X Version 10.5 ("Leopard") as meeting the UNIX 03 standard. The other UNIX 03 certified operating systems are Solaris 10, HP-UX 11i V3, and AIX 5L.

Speaking of which...

For a while there, Sun was offering free copies of its Solaris 10 system.

This link might still work...

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-express/get.jsp

I installed it onto an older x86 machine of mine...

Not bad...considering..

( who said there's no such thing as a free lunch ? )

Aquafire

 

[aliaze1]

There is no way that two AMD 2.6GHz Opteron cores can even get close to the processing power of eight Intel 3.0GHz Xeon cores.

lol!