Niall Mullen's Weblog

Tuesday Dec 06, 2005

sunfire t2000

Continuing the look of the new machines we have our latest offering today. The sun fire t2000 which includes our new "cool threads technology" or ultrasparc-t1 or sun4v for those not in marketing. On the surface we have reused that nice easy to open box seen in the 4200 aka galaxy machine.

As with the galaxy we have the 4 e1000g interfaces on the rear

This allows using solaris 10's Link aggregation architecture which is part of the Gld v3 driver framework in Solaris 10. This allows all four on board nics to act as a sinlge logical interface which gives some nice bandwidth.

However thats about it for similarities, the first thing you will notice is that under the hotswap location for the fans we dont have the six fans we did with the galaxy but half the amount some indication of the lower power requirments of the new cpu.

My colleague Fintan Ryan has already posted the details of exactly what you get under the hood, 32 threads of execution on 8 cores - very nice for size of this piece of kit considering its lower power requirments.
So ill leave you with about as much as can physically be seen of the new cpus. Maybe not as cool looking as you might expect for the punch packed inside, but hey its whats inside that counts !

Posted at 04:59PM Dec 06, 2005 by nmullen in Solaris |

Monday Sep 12, 2005

oooh pretty, the new galaxy

Well today we ship our new range of systems the x4100 & x4200 known internally as
"galaxy". I've been working with these systems for some time. The new box's as is
being widely reported have been designed by our returned co-founder and hardware design
guru Andy Bechtolsheim. So what are they like you ask ?

Well my photography skills dont count for much, but here they are, but its
not my photography you will see else were.

See that looks much more appealing.

The The entire casing can be taken apart and back together in its entirety
without the use of a screwdriver. Ok so thats nothing revoloutionary but
definitely nice, I've seen too many box's that the case can be taken apart
etc.. with no screws, only to discover the pci cards are screwed in and I
need to go find a screwdriver.

If you actually get hold of one of these you will discover some serious
airflow, but that tends to be needed to cool the opetron beasts within,
particularly the dual core species which packs quite a punch for a 2U machine.
One of the cool design features is the airflow, its controlled and funelled by
the shape of the case to hit exactly where its needed.

The airflow itself is driven by six fans located at the front of
the machine, neatly accessible via a small top opening panel.

All fans are of course hot swappable.

This design does solve one of my pet peeves. In that i only need to
slide the box about 6 inches out of the rack and have to disconnect
a grand total of zero cables. To achive the same with one of the
ibm box's we have here, I gotta get 80% of the box out of the
rack to make it accessible as the case has to slide off all
the way from where the fans are back. To do this of course all the cables
have to come out.

Internally we have a reasonably standard internal configuration, with a
few differences from the norm: 4 x 2.5" drives and a dvd on the front.
4 x gigabit eithernet on the back which is nice to have I spend too much
time searching for extra ethernet cards.

So I for one welcome our new silver, easy access, hotswappable overlords.

Posted at 01:21PM Sep 12, 2005 by nmullen in Solaris | Comments[1]