New Sun Galaxy Servers

Well, here’s what two of the upcoming “Galaxy” line of Opteron based servers from Sun will look like:

Sun Galaxy Servers

I’m really looking forward to seeing what Andy has done with this new line. The Sun v20z/v40z boxes are great and all (and we bought quite a few of them at my last job) but they’re certainly not “Sun boxes”. In fact, the v20z box was the very first 1U reference Opteron server that AMD made available for early adopters (more than a year before Sun silk-screened their logo on it).

I’ve been really hoping we’d get something like a hybrid OpenBoot/BIOS box - press a button and it boots in OpenBoot mode to run Solaris (or Linux, say) or press the button to go into a traditional PC BIOS boot mode to run Windows. God I’d love to not have to deal with a BIOS on x86 hardware…

I like the look of them - the same grey and honeycomb grill as the new Ultra 20. Looks like we’ll get all the details on September 12th. I can’t wait!

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Published:: Friday, September 2nd, 2005 at 9:04 am

Author:: mark

Category:: general, solaris

benr

September 2nd, 2005
15:53 GMT

Wow! Finally, something from Sun as sexxy (or more so?) than Apple! Can’t wait!

Octave Orgeron

September 4th, 2005
21:58 GMT

I’ve heard that the same chassis will be used for the Niagara boxes that will appear in ‘06. I’m really excited about these pictures, it’ll be nice to see kewl hardware like this in our datacenter:)

Doug frith

September 6th, 2005
5:12 GMT

Yeah, I went to the Sun “Education sessions” (read as marketing lunch) last week and they went over some of the tech stuff. With Solaris (since 9) now being NUMA aware and the Opteron having amazingly low latency when accessing memory attached to a remote cpu is called (1.1X for 1 cpu hop, 1.5X for 2 cpu hop.. the max in an 8 way box), it almost seems like SUN is setting the Opteron up to replace sparc servers with less than 8 CPU’s.

Also, FINALLY after 15 years SUN replaces the spud drive tray.. and goes with some sexy chrome like finish.. bad news, they have a power cut off switch on the chassis.. if you open it (let say for hot swap pci cards) the server powers off Just a heads up.

Also, PCI-E will be used for more than just graphics cards.. 4G fibre, 10G ethernet (replacement for the current backplane in upcoming SUN gear, woops, did I say that out loud?)… Oracle on nfs with 10Gbe with a netapp 9XX series filer with a crap load of 15K rpm drives….. ah. too bad oracle thinks dual core == dual cpu.. bah.

-doug

mark

September 6th, 2005
10:56 GMT

Hey Doug. Looks like they went with the newer, smaller 2.5″ drives too, eh? Great news! I’m hoping the 4 and/or 8 way boxes will have those new drive bays lined up right across the front. More drives = more better!

Good news on the PCI-e front. 10GE definitely needs a good fast bus, and PCI-e seems to be the ticket. Yeah. Great stuff if that’s the case. Should be a good platform for them to work with for the next few years. Of course that power off crap seems like trouble! Hopefully Sun spent some time with the latest IBM xSeries chassis — IBM really raised the bar on what’s possible with a “PC” server. I love the x345.

I agree with the Opteron comment. There’s no doubt Sun’s not planning on competing on the “lower end” with Sparc. You’ll get crazy hardware availability stuff on the Sparc line, and the ability to scale way, way up. But for a lot of application workloads these Galaxy server with, say, an 8-way (4 x dual-core) Opteron compliment is going to be a LOT of server. My guess is that the low-to-midrange Sparc line will all but disapear in the next year or two.

Jukka Vaisanen

September 7th, 2005
11:29 GMT

Err.. I was surprised at some of these “cool” changes like:
- Why does it have to look like a Mac?
- the slot-loading DVD (let’s hope it IS a DVD - our V20z came with CD-ROM?!) bang your rack door with the disc instead of the drive tray
- the new disk drive packaging (is this the 6th or 7th drive casing that they will have in production simultaneously..)
- 2.5″ drives.. SAS (Serial SCSI) ones maybe? why not.. I just hope they won’t cost 1k USD each.
- just 2 disks in the 1U version.. oh well. at least there’s airflow.
- system runmode “key” is not there.. traditional Sun feature with deeply rooted OpenBoot links..
- USB port(s) on front (looks like), always welcome
- Whee! No floppy drive!

But so far there’s not much to see that sets these apart from V20z and V40z systems but I’m waiting to see the back panel.. and the ALOM they put in it. And still hoping for OpenBoot of course.

Maybe Sun will get off their asses and make a AMD x86 blade system with those 2.5″ drives on each blade.. pleaaaase?

- Vaizki

Derek TactilePro Warren

September 11th, 2005
21:39 GMT

There’s a CNET interview with Andy Bechtolscheim, just published today. The report says those drives are indeed serial-attached SCSI, and that Andy seems to be working on Opteron blades. Wheee!

The reported price of $745USD on the smaller Galaxy box really blew me away. I’ll take two!

And not everything with a grille looks like a Mac! No one said that about the (butt-ugly) 280R.

amd operton