Sun Fire B1600 Intelligent ShelfTranscript:Eric: Welcome to today's product review. I'm Eric Nielsen and I've been a system administrator for most of my adult life. Junaid: And I'm Junaid Saiyed. I work on technologies that automate system administration. Eric: Today we're going to take a look at Sun's new blade computing platform, the Blade1600. There's been a lot of noise in the industry about blade computing as of late. Junaid, why don't you tell us a little bit about what blade computing really is. Junaid: Well, blade computing is nothing new, it's just a new form factor. Blades are nothing but CPUs, hard drives, and nics in a really, really small form factor. And then all these blades are stacked into a shelf which has an inbuilt ethernet switch as well as a power supply. Eric: Junaid and I got a chance to take a look at this machine close up in Sun's lab in Menlo Park, CA. The Blade1600 is one of the latest systems in the SunFire line of servers from Sun. The Blade1600 consists of a four inch high, rack mountable chassis with slots that take sixteen blades. The blade modules come in three different configurations: a single processor SPARC based blade, a singe processor AMD based blade, and a dual processor AMD based blade. On the right, you can see that the dual processor blade is twice as wide, which will take two slots in the B1600 chassis. Each blade runs its own copy of an operating system and is considered an independent machine. Sun has also kept the price down on the blade modules. You can buy a blade module for under $1800 and a chassis for under $5000. We looked at a Blade1600 that contained four blade modules. Sun ships the machine with blank filler cards that can be placed in the empty slots of the chassis. These filler cards are required to maintain the proper airflow over the active blades. As you can see, we took a look at an empty chassis. The blade cards plug into the back plane that connects each blade to a bus that provides an interface to power and network connections. Taking a look at the back of the Blade machine, you can see the ethernet switch on the top and the power supply on the bottom. There are two sets of both the power supply and the ethernet switch which provides hot swappable redundancy. Sun also has spent some time on the small details, offering safety pins and cable harnesses to keep things neat. We opened up one of the blade cards and took a look at the layout of the components. The center top contains the 650 MH CPU and on the center bottom is the two memory slots that can hold up to 2 GB of memory. On the left you see the hard drive which is a very compact, 40 GB drive. It was great to get a first hand look at this hardware. Junaid, what did you think about this machine? Junaid: Well, as with anything, there are pros and cons about this. What I really liked about this box was the fact that it allows you to horizontally scale your applications over multiple OS instances. The OS running on these blades can also be different. You can have a Solaris application sitting right next to a Linux application. The SunFire 1600 also comes with a rich set of command line interfaces which allow you to take the individual blades offline, the power supply offline, as well as the switch offline. One thing that I really didn't like about the blade computing architecture as a whole is the fact that they have pretty strict cooling requirements. The fact that they are stacked together in a small chassis means that you cannot have high-end processors in them since they tend to run pretty hot. All in all I really liked the box. It's got some really good features and I think it's really ideally suited for some low end computing tasks like web servers, print servers, mail servers. I think it should be a big hit. Eric: Thanks, Junaid. There are several things that I really like about this box as well. First, I really like the idea that we can get SPARC and x86 based blades from Sun now. Sun has had its Solaris x86 operating system for many years, but it has never back that up with hardware. Now, with the Blade1600, Sun actually enters into the AMD processor based system's business. And, I think that is a really great move for Sun's customers and Sun itself. Another thing I really liked about this machine, of course, is the form factor. If you look at some of the competitors like IBM and HP, their form factor for their dual processor blades are somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-10 inches tall, where Sun has done a really good job keeping the form factor of even their dual processor blades down to 4 inches. Another impressive thing about the form factor is just cabling. You used to have to run tons of cable to each one of these systems. Cabling for X1s or T1s was a nightmare in the sense that you had 32 cables, 32 power cables. Now with blade computing you actually just have all the cables in a central place, power supplies are shared by all the blades that are plugged in, so you have a lot less cabling requirements and that, in itself, is a lot less work for an administrator. There really isn't much that I don't like about this machine from Sun. I think Sun's done a really good job of architecting this machine. The only thing that I could say about it is that blade computing, in general, is for specific tasks. If you are trying to build an Oracle database where you needed terrabytes of memory, you couldn't get this from this machine. So, clearly, this machine and this architecture has its place in the industry. I think Sun's done a good job at doing that. Junaid: Well, that was a fun box to review. I think Sun has a winner here. Eric: Me too, Junaid. Hope everyone enjoyed getting to take a look at the B1600. We'll see you next time. Credits:
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