On Wednesday February 27th 2008, Microsoft launched Windows Server 2008 in Los Angeles. Sun was part of the launch as a Gold Partner. I was part of the team demoing the Sun Ray server running in a VM on top of Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V. That demo was running on a small 2U server, the Sun Fire X4450. It is a very small server, only 2 rack units high. I mean it's just 2U, how big can it be? Right?
Well, try 4-sockets with 16 processing cores clocked at 2.4 GHz, 128 GB of RAM, 8 internal SAS disk drives with RAID 0/1/5/6/10/50/60 and 6 PCIe slots! And yes, all that fits in 2 rack units if you have Sun engineers design it. Sure, we could have just slapped the 4-socket caneland motherboard in one of our 4U chassis just like the other guys... But where would have been the value of that design?
Can your 2U servers do that?
