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Director, Network World Test Alliance

Best Products: Network Infrastructure finalists

Feature
Feb 27, 20062 mins
Data CenterIBMNetwork Switches

Back to the Network Infrastructure winner

IBM’s IBM x336 PC-based server earned a spot on our top performer’s list in this category because Lab Alliance member John Bass was impressed with its solid performance, great physical design and wide set of management features. The server’s single-rack space form should be attractive for enterprise applications where two-processor servers are needed but space is a premium, Bass said.

Sun earned two finalist rankings in this category. The Sun N2120V content switch picked up kudos from tester David Newman for its good performance, with support for as many as 1.25 million concurrent connections and as many as 230,000 new connections set up each second. This makes the Sun box a fit for all but the very largest data centers. The key differentiator is the N2120V’s ability to let users define multiple switching and routing domains on a single box.

Sun’s SunFire T2000 server is powered by the first-ever eight-core UltraSPARC chip, based on Sun’s reduced instruction set chip UltraSPARC T1 architecture all packed into a 2U-high, 385-watt server. Lab Alliance member Tom Henderson found the T2000 to be unusual (in a good way) in that it gave performance numbers unmatched for the power and space it consumes.

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