Breaking News--Sun Launches the First Three "Galaxy" Opteron Servers

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September 12, 2005

Sun Launches the First Three "Galaxy" Opteron Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

After more than 18 months of development, the first three machines in Sun Microsystems "Galaxy" line of Opteron-based servers make their debut today at the company's quarterly announcement event, which is being held in New York. There will be a lot of bad puns, such as Sun hitching its star on the Galaxies or people calling them "Becky Boxes," because Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun's founder and CTO, returned to Sun to create the Galaxies. There may also be accidental puns, since X and Z are really close on the keyboard and I keep typing "Galazy."

But in my case, at least, this is not some sort of Freudian slip. These are good, powerful, little machines, and they bode well for Sun's prospects in the X64 server market--no matter what my left ring finger apparently thinks about it.

There are reasons why the Galaxy machines are not the Galazy machines. For one thing, Bechtolsheim is a good engineer and Sun has lots of other good engineers, and this time they got to do some work on the Opteron boxes Sun is selling. Last time, Sun went to the Newisys unit of SCI-Sanmina, which did most of the work to create the Sun Fire V20z and V40z servers that Sun has been selling since early 2004 as placeholders for the Galaxy boxes. The V20z and V40z machines have allowed Sun to go from zero to sixth place in the X86/X64 server market and were predominantly a way for Sun to learn how to do X64 servers and play in the volume server market. But these machines are more than that. The Galaxy machines represent the first real research and development that Sun has ever done to create an X86 server, and as is the case with any company that has engineering at its heart, the Galaxy machines will show through in these touches.

You can't see most of the engineering tweaks from the outside of the box, of course. But Sun has designed its own motherboards for the Galaxies and added supplemental electronics the AMD 8000 chipsets provide the one- or two-CPU sockets in the initial Galaxy machines. According to John Fowler, general manager of Sun's Network Systems Group, you will have to open up a Galaxy machine to see all of the little things that have allowed Sun to cram a lot of computing into a small package. "The thing about the industry standard server market is that the chips are available to anyone, but being able to take the best advantage of the components is another thing." For instance, Fowler is pretty certain that IBM and Hewlett Packard will not be able to use the forthcoming 2.4 GHz Opteron 200 Series chip because its heat dissipation jumps from 89 watts at 2.2 GHz to around 120 watts at 2.4 GHz. The reason, says Fowler, is that the guts of the Galaxies have a clean design with high-velocity air flow moving front to back over the components. 1U and 2U servers from most vendors have hot-swap, 3.5-inch disk drives in the front, and air is sucked across these drives, effectively pre-heating it before it is drawn across the CPUs, memory DIMMs and other components to cool them. By using 2.5-inch Serial Attached SCSI disks and moving these disks and the DVD drive off to the side as well as using a very efficient power supply, Sun can keep the temperature down inside the Galaxy chassis and therefore use the hotter and faster Opteron chips. "When you open this up and look inside," Fowler says, "you will see that it doesn't look like a normal rack server."

The Sun Galaxies

By concentrating on power consumption, Sun will be claiming that the Galaxies deliver the most performance per watt in the X64 market, bar none, and the highest performance of any X64 server on the market, bar none. Proving this will be another matter, but Sun will be rolling out the benchmarks to make its case to the masses, says Fowler.

Sun's first Opteron box, the Sun Fire V20z, is a two-socket Opteron server that supports single- and dual-core Opteron 200 Series processors; it fits in a 1U rack form factor and supports up to 16 GB of main memory, two disk drives, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The V40z server is a four-socket machine (again, supporting single- or dual-core Opterons) with five disk bays and space for a floppy drive and a CD drive in its 3U rack chassis. The V40z supports up to two Gigabit Ethernet ports and up to 32 GB of main memory.

The important thing as far as Sun is concerned is that the size of its addressable X64 server market has just increased significantly by moving from the Sun Fire V20z and V40z machines to the Galaxy boxes. Fowler says these two machines gave Sun an addressable market of about $5 billion or so in annual sales. With the three new Galaxy machines being announced today and the other models that will be rolling out in the future, he reckons that Sun's addressable market has increased to $17 billion--an improvement factor of 3.4. When you combine the triple digit growth Sun has seen in its X64 server sales (albeit from a small base) with the expansion of its market, you can see why Sun is expecting good things from the Galaxies.

The first machine in the Galaxy line is Sun's first single-socket Opteron server, and it is, as I suggested some months ago, based on the dual-core Opteron 100 Series workstation Sun launched in July. That W1100z workstation supported Opteron 144s running at 1.8 GHz to Opteron 150s running at 2.2 GHz, and had up to 8 GB of main memory, an integrated Gigabit Ethernet port, space for two 80 GB SATA disks, and five PCI-X slots. The Galaxy X2100 server--yes, Sun did in fact use the X moniker in its server names even though IBM already does--is basically the same workstation motherboard that has been tweaked to be a server board.

The X2100 box is the bare-bones Galaxy, says Fowler, designed with the minimal set of features to keep it inexpensive yet powerful. It has a single CPU socket, a single power supply, and a single fan. It is aimed at infrastructure and HPC workloads in particular. The X2100 server supports the single-core Opterons running at 1.8 GHz to 2.2 GHz as well as the dual-core Opteron 175, which runs at 2.2 GHz as well. The X2100 supports two 3.5-inch SATA drives (80 GB or 250 GB) and has four memory slots that, like the W1100z, use 400 MHz unbuffered ECC memory DIMMs, for a total capacity of 4 GB. The unbuffered DIMMs plus the dual-core Opteron 175 make this box pretty peppy for a single-socket Opteron box. The X2100 has two Gigabit Ethernet ports and comes with Solaris 10 preloaded. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (both 32-bit and 64-bit) are supported and certified on this server as well. A base X2100 box with a 1.8 GHz Opteron and 512 MB of memory will cost $795, with a typical configuration with a few gigs of memory and some disks and a dual-core Opteron costing around $2,000, according to Fowler.

The X4100 and the X4200 servers have a totally different look and feel from the existing Sun Fire machines as well as the X2100. The X4100 is a 1U chassis with the CPU and memory on the left and the DVD and SAS drives on the right. The two SAS drives sit side-by-side under the DVD drive, and the two Opteron sockets are on the left behind a big open grating that can suck a lot of air over the CPUs. Both single- and dual-core Opterons are supported in the X4100, and Sun is putting in the fastest possible Opterons in this machine because Sun wants to show the best performance per watt. (Using the low voltage Opterons would deliver a cooler server, but the performance would drop even faster, according to Fowler.)

The X4100 has a total of eight memory slots and supports up to 16 GB of main memory; it has two low-profile PCI-X slots and four integrated Gigabit Ethernet ports. It also has an integrated RAID o/1 disk controller and a service processor, which supports remote, lights-out management. Basically, the X4100 crams more features than is found on the V20z into half the space. The X4100 comes with Solaris 10 preconfigured, but supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4, SUSE Professional 9 (not SLES, at least not yet), and the Standard and Enterprise Editions of Windows Server 2003. A base X4100 with a single-core 2.2 GHz Opteron 248, 1 GB of main memory, one power supply, and the service processor costs $2,195. With two single-core 2.6 GHz Opteron 254s, 2 GB of memory, no disks, redundant power supplies, and the service processor, the X4100 costs $5,095. Pricing was not available at press time for a machine with four Opteron cores, but that is clearly what the 4 signifies in the name.

The X4200 is a two-socket server as well, but the chassis is a 2U rather than a 1U, which allows two more SAS disks to be stacked underneath the DVD drive. If Sun could get one whole motherboard into a 1U chassis, it stands to reason that it could get two in a 2U chassis, and it would not be surprising to see the next machine from Sun be the X4200 with two boards and linking the boards together with HyperTransport pipes. (Sun has not said it will do this, of course. Nor has it said that it will deliver a Galaxy blade server based on the same Galaxy cell boards, but I still think it is inevitable that Sun will do this.) In any event, a base X4200 sells for a $400 premium compared to the base X4100, at $2,595. A reasonable configuration with two dual-core Opteron 275 chips, 4 GB of memory, a DVD drive, two 73 GB SAS drives, redundant power supplies costs $7,795.