Sun / Solaris

For the first time in several *years* I installed a Solaris box today. Let’s talk software first. Solaris 9 (8/03) came on a DVD. The “Web Start” via serial console is pretty much the same as I remember it from Solaris 7/8. You can specify megabytes in the disk slice “editor” (and I use the term loosely in this case) now. Yay. Once the box was up and running, I couldn’t decide if I was amazed, disapointed, or relieved to see that Sun *still* turns on everything but the kitchen sink by default. I mean, jesus it’s 2004 already! Even all the Linux distros are smart enough to lock down network services by default! Check this out:

bash-2.05# netstat -an|grep LISTEN|wc -l
      53

53 TCP ports listening on all available interfaces. 53. Fuck off.

The box is SunFire 280R, with two of Sun’s fastest 1.2GHz UltraSparc III+ Cu 8MB CPUs (the only reason we got the 280 instead of the cheaper 240 was so we could get the less-shitty fat-cache copper version of the UltraSparc III). You also get 2 72GB 10KRPM FC-AL disks, 2GB of RAM, and we popped 2 Fibre-Channel HBAs in it. Single port Qlogic 2310s from 2000 at that.. Way to keep up-to-date with your HBA Sun! I was pretty shocked that all the PCI slots but one were 33MHz! Just one 66MHz slot that’s shared with the internal FC loop! Everything about the machine felt dated. And then I noticed that the onboard Ethernet isn’t even Gigabit!!!! Argh! Useless for our needs as a backup server! Even the rails were shitty compared to what we’re used to getting from IBM these days.

When you compare the 4U 280R with the 2U x345 we installed yesterday it’s pretty startling. The 345 has CPUs that are almost 3 times as fast, has 6 hot-swap drive bays up front with integrated hardware RAID, has more 100 or 133MHz PCI-X slots spread across 3 buses, two copper GigE’s, and tool-less rails.

All in all, Sun is dead if they think the 280R is competitive in ANY way. Hopefully that fancy SunFire Interconnect(tm) and Solaris combo will indeed keep the data moving to our L700.