Niall Mullen's Weblog

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]