AnandTech Exclusive: Sun's sub-$1000 SunFire X2100 Server

Final Thoughts

Today's look at the SunFire X2100 was one of the most exciting system launches that we've seen in a while. The SunFire X2100 takes all of the better elements of nForce4, Opteron and IPMI, and combines them into a very affordable, scalable node. Sun manages to cut the cost of many of the more expensive components in favor of efficient, cutting-edge tech instead. Particularly impressive is Sun's ability to sell these components at such a reasonable cost. Yes, as ironic as "Sun" and "reasonable cost" sound together in a sentence, the low end Aquarius servers are actually a very good value. Whiteboxing the components alone for Sun's "small" configuration of the X2100 would generally run in the neighborhood of $500, but other amenities like the roll-out rack rails, hot swap SATA drive bays, Solaris 10, and IPMI service processor quickly escalate the price further.

The performance of our "extra large" configuration was nearly on par with dual Opteron servers and workstations that we've looked at in the past, but at a fraction of the cost and footprint. Using Sun's N1 and other management tools actually make it much more cost effective to buy four Aquarius nodes (perhaps only one with a hard drive even) rather than a single quad Opteron server (if your particular application scales, that is).

Another interesting position of Sun's new direction includes the prospect that end users will probably reconfigure the hardware (particularly the entry level components), as soon as they get them. Even though Sun is happy to provide clients with bleeding edge hardware off the factory floor, during my conferences with Sun, there seemed to be an expectation that end users buying a few of these new SunFires will add a few more sticks of memory, or a PCIe InifiniBand adaptor - particularly on the entry level x64 servers like the one that we saw today. Sun doesn't seem too upset about this either; the company's new direction seems very clearly laid out toward selling efficient and innovative technology as a bottom line rather than gouging repeat customers on proprietary hardware.

Now that Mr. Bechtolsheim's influence has started to propagate through all levels of Sun again, the new products and services of the company are clearly redefining themselves with his direction. Sun is clearly using their size to reclaim a lot of territory that they lost after the dot-bomb, and products like the SunFire X2100 will continue to get them back to that point.