EXCLUSIVE: It’s still business as usual in Sun Microsystems' server division. In this exclusive review we take a close look at its new Sun Fire X4275, which has a sharp focus on storage-hungry applications such as multimedia, data warehousing and video surveillance.

The X4275 is up against some tough competition as you have HP’s ProLiant DL380 G6 and Dell’s new PowerEdge R710 in the same arena and both offer an interesting range of features. With a dozen 3.5in SAS/SATA hot-swap hard disk bays at the front, the X4275 is certainly big on storage capacity as it can serve up 12TB now and 24TB with the soon-to-be-launched 2TB SATA drives.

Dell and HP have gone down the SFF drive route as the DL380 supports up to 16 of these whilst the R710 can handle just eight. The X4275 doesn’t support SFF drives so if you want them in your Sun server then go for the X4270 which can handle up to 16.

The lid has a small, hinged section at the front, which provides easy access to the bank of 12 hot-swap fans allowing them to be replaced without turning the server off. The main part of the lid is released with a small tab under the front section but be careful as sliding this back initiates an immediate server shutdown – even with the OS running.

Underneath this you’ll find a very tidy interior that is designed to make the most of the internal real estate. The pair of 2.53GHz E5540 Xeons included in the price are positioned next to each other at the front of the motherboard and topped off with chunky passive heatsinks. Each has a dedicated bank of nine DIMM sockets to one side and the review system was supplied with a total of 12GB of 1066MHz DDR3 memory.

Sun has the virtualisation angle covered as the motherboard offers an internal USB port and a CompactFlash card slot for booting an embedded hypervisor. However, both Dell and HP have gone a step further as their servers offer an embedded SD memory card slot instead. The X4275 certainly has room to grow with demand as it has three riser cards at the back offering a total of six PCI-Express 2.0 slots.

One of the PCI-e slots is occupied by a RAID controller, which is based on Adaptec’s RAID 5805 adapter. It offers a pair of 4-channel SAS/SATA ports, has a 1.2GHz dual-core ROC (RAID on Chip) plus 256MB of DDR2 cache memory and the battery backup pack as well.

[pb/]To support all 12 storage bays the card is wired through to the drive backplane, which has an integral SAS expander. The server also supports 3.5in SSDs but there are a number of limitations. SSDs require full power at system initialisation but the initial power surge that occurs during power up limits you to eight 32GB SSDs.

The X4275 doesn’t go short in the network department as it has four embedded Gigabit ports. Power redundancy is also on the cards as the server came with both 1050W hot-plug supplies included in the price. With the server hooked up to our inline power meter we found it reasonably easy on the utility supply.

In standby we measured it drawing 14W and with Windows Server 2003 R2 idling along this rose to 180W. With SiSoft Sandra pummelling all 16 logical cores we measured a peak draw of 314W. To put this in perspective, we saw a Dell PowerEdge R710 with a very similar spec pulling 16W in standby, 150W in idle and only 270W under load.

For general remote server administration, the X4275 has Sun’s embedded ILOM (integrated lights out management) chip, which presents a dedicated Fast Ethernet port at the rear. Its secure web interface opens with a status report on all critical components and their condition. Tables are provided showing the values for all voltages, temperatures and fan speeds and predefined alert thresholds are applied to each one.

Basic power monitoring features are provided so you can see current power, the permitted maximum load and available power. You also get a power history table but, unlike HP’s iLO2 chip and its Power Meter upgrade, you don’t get any nice graphs.

Usefully, the ILOM provides full remote control and virtual media services as standard whereas HP and Dell expect you to pay extra for these. The remote control tools proved useful as we needed to load an OS on the review system but the X4275 only has two USB ports and no room for an optical drive at the front. Run locally with a USB optical drive we would have been limited to keyboard input only but the KVM-over-IP service avoided these problems.

Sun can’t match HP, IBM or Dell for general systems management tools as its optional xVM Ops Center software suite is only really aimed at managing Sun servers. With HP, for example, you get its Insight Control Edition (ICE) software as standard, which provides the facilities for managing and monitoring a range of network devices including servers.

The X4275 puts forward a strong proposition as a storage server as it has a high potential capacity and plenty of room to expand. Build quality is good, it comes with a solid three-year on-site warranty and power consumption isn’t excessive either.

Author: Dave Mitchell

Sun Microsystems Sun Fire X4275 storage server review