[geeks] Sun to adopt newest Intel Xeon chips for upcoming servers (link)

[Mark Benson]

On 23 Jan 2007, at 11:23, Bill Bradford wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 02:15:23AM -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
>> At this point, why by a Sun if it's just going to be Yet Another  
>> Intel
>> Reference Design In An Overpriced Chassis?
>
> The only "reference design" system they were selling that I saw was  
> the
> original x2100 which was a Tyan-motherboard system.

The fact the only 'reference' design came from Tyan, not AMD leads me  
to believe AMD possess few reference  designs for server hardware.  
Like Apple and PowerPC, Sun and Opteron means a bit of work to  
actually design the boards. A certain amount of it is in place, such  
as chipset design (which Apple had to do a good deal of themselves on  
PowerPC) but nowhere do I see standard AMD issued board for servers  
along the lines of Intel's. I will openly retract any of the  
following if anyone can prove otherwise, I've not looked into Opteron  
servers in huge depth outside of Sun's (why bother, Sun's are the  
best anyway ;o) ) but I don't see a huge number of companies taking  
them up, which leads me to believe something Intel offers makes  
Xeon;s an easier platform to work with.

We have a Dell Poweredge 1800 at work (freestanding or rackmount 4U)  
and the whole mainboard is Intel branded. Also I have the mainboard  
out of an old IBM Slot 1 Dual PIII Server under my desk in a 4U case,  
and it's an Intel L440GX+. I'm not saying Sun will cheap-out Dell  
style and use bog-bog-standard boards, but it strikes me as a much  
more complete solution than anything AMD have on offer (to my  
knowledge at least). Much like Apple, Sun have a lot of the  
backbreaking work done already, all they have to do is shape it to  
suit, and that special Sun ingredient and you've got really good  
server hardware, relatively easily.

> Everything else has been designed in-house AFAIK (by Bechtolsteim's  
> group), and is *really
> nice* enterprise-class x86 hardware (proper ILO/LOM via either  
> remote  KVM or SSH, fault management, etc).

Although I agree I don't think Sun will settle on an all-off-the- 
shelf solution, much like Apple have designed custom hardware around  
standard components for their line of computers, Intel has all of the  
above available for use as standard parts.

Our Poweredge 1800 has a remote access PCI card in it (Dell 'DRAC'  
branded but it intereacts with Intel on-board hardware so is likely  
an Intel board) that interacts with the BMC control chipset (a long  
time standard component in Intel servers) and gives you complete  
remote KVM service for LOM on the box from anywhere you can access  
the IP. It also has capacity to e-mail and alert via SNMP even when  
the machine shuts down. When combined with redundant PSU hardware it  
makes a great package. It's all powered by Java too, so Sun won't hav  
too many objection! Anyway it works well and saves me getting off my  
ass! Now if only I could get tit to change the tapes and deliver them  
to my desk every day ;o) I believe something like this is built into  
Dell's newest breed of Intel servers, and no longer an add-on card.  
That's what I gathered from the sales bumph anyway...

Oh, I don't know if it supports LOM over SSH, I've never investigated  
it. It's only an embedded server on a card so it's likely it could be  
easily implemented. The whole thing is Dell branded (the web  
interface at least - notably the Java client isn't). It's conceivable  
that Sun could provide a similar, or more likely better, system with  
the existing technology.

I dunno, my knowledge is limited, but I know what I know ;o)

> If the Intel chips go into the same class of systems as their x2100- 
> M2-and-up is currently, you'll see some really nice boxes to run  
> Solaris x86 on.

Without doubt, I expect great things from Sun with the new Intel  
partnership.

-- 
Mark Benson

My Blog:
<http://mdblog.68kmac.org>
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