Sun Fire V40z: Four Opterons in a 3U
by Kristopher Kubicki on February 22, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Thermals, Acoustic
Cooling four processors crammed into a 3U is not an easy process – particularly considering the fact that the V40z does not utilize any active cooling directly on their CPU heat sinks. As we mentioned earlier, the two forward Opterons under the hard drive bay use two low profile copper heat sinks; the two rear processors use 4” high copper heat sinks with heatpipe risers. All air must be pulled from the front intake of the system (below and through the hard drive bays) all the way to the rear power supplies before it is exhausted.The majority of cooling is provided by a bank of eight intelligent fans behind all four processors and another bank of four fans that sit between the forward and rear processors. In the image below, this bank is being removed from the system.
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
Obviously, with twelve primary 60mm fans just providing the active cooling on the processors and memory, the Sun Fire V40z is not a quiet machine. Each redundant power supply also employs very loud fans, which gives the V40z a baseline operating noise level of 70 dBA even when the machine isn’t on. At a distance of twelve inches, we measured the Sun Fire V40z at a little over 85dBA. This is loud even by a rackmount standard, but in enterprise server configurations in dedicated server environments, this is certainly not a problem.
Even though the Sun Fire V40z is only 3U high, a standard 72-inch rack can only hold twelve V40z’s due to its thermal density, according to Sun documentation. Any more than twelve servers in a 72” rack wouldn’t allow for enough airflow.
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RyanVM - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Did anybody else find it confusing that the reviewed system had CG-stepping Opteron 850s and Kris brought up E4-stepping Opteron 852s on multiple occasions? What CPUs were actually in the system?SUOrangeman - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Last page, .."Sun has a speed **daemon** on their hands, ..."
Freudian slip, hehe? Nice read nonetheless.
-SUO
KristopherKubicki - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
MrEMan: Mediaplex is just an advertising server. Some advertisers (like NewEgg) host their banners on Mediaplex so they don't destroy their bandwidth. Sometimes when an ad campaign is hitting too many impressions the Mediaplex tag will revert to a 2x2 or a 1x1 pixel so that they don't harm their click through rates. It has nothing to do with spyware or malware or adware.Kristopher
MrEMan - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Anandtech,What is with the 1/16" x 1/16" graphic (1280x1024 resolution on a 19" CRT monitor) for adfarm.mediaplex.com ?
Is it there with your permission or did someone hack your site?
If it is there with your permission, I must say I am surprised that you would put such stealth adware garbage links on your site.
jcourtney - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I'd love to see some benchmarks with Solaris instead of or vs. Linux for reference too. Nice read though as usual.ElFenix - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
"particularly considering the fact that the V40z does not utilize any active cooling directly on their CPU heat sinks"whoa, proper spelling of heat sink!
now i'm going to harp on the fact that blowing air across a radiator with a fan is not active cooling. air conditioning is active cooling, turning on the ceiling fan is not.
=)
nice read
Hikari - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
I wish I could see a comparison of this and that Quad Opteron HP server. I have the HP one budgeted for this year already... (we're also a Sun shop).I didn't see an option for 15k RPM drives though. I could put in like 5-146GB@15k RPM in the HP which was one reason I was leaning towards it.
lihoyin - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Looking forward for a comparsion with HP DL585 / DL 385, both are also Monsters!Sunner - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Googer, that's true, Sun basically just rebadges Newisys servers, the same is true of the V20Z, in fact IIRC you can actually find some Newisys marks left on the servers :)Anyway, Kris, any chance of a couple of benchmarks with a 2.6 based distro?
2.6 has, among other things, good NUMA support, something that would be nice to have when running a 4-way Opteron ;)
//Sunner
dougSF30 - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
Another 250/850 typo on page 3: "Below, you can see one of the Opteron 250s is exposed from under the copper heat sink on the daughterboard."