* User gives thumbs-up to Sun's latest servers
Users applauded Sun’s launch this week of more x86-based Opteron servers.
The company is launching two servers – a four to 16 processor eight-socket system for high-performance technical computing and a two-processor media server intended to be used to store and retrieve digital and medical images.
These servers – the Sun Fire x4600 and the x4500 – build on Sun’s introduction of the x4100 and x4200 – last fall.
“Sun is getting back to what they used to be good at – delivering affordable systems based on commodity components which ends up being better than the sum of its parts,” says Phillip Fayers, IT manager for the School of Psychology at Cardiff University in Wales.
Although his department has no need for the x4600, other departments in the university do.
“The Star Formation group based in the School of Physics and Astronomy has had parallel codes for a long time now which scale nicely to 16 processors,” says Fayers. “The group has used various systems over the years and has tried eight-socket Opteron systems in the past.”
He adds: “We’ve been waiting for someone to turn the eight-socket market into a commodity market in the same way as happened in the two- and four-socket market years ago – now it looks like Sun may have managed that.”
He says the most significant feature of the x4600 may be its price. According to sources, the x4600 starts at $37,650.
“Whilst the list price might look a little expensive for an Opteron system when compared to an eight-socket UltraSPARC or Power5 system, it starts to look really cheap,” says Fayers.
“At the moment a 16-way HPC-capable system is quite an expensive beast, if Sun manages to get a 16-CPU system working at a sensible price, they’ll have a practical monopoly in that area of the market.”
