Sun has been focused on reducing U's and the heat is killing the systems.

Two thing kill servers: heat and vibration. The focus on 1u vs. 2u is not really increasing the number of systems per rack but is killing the mean time between failure because of the dense packaging.

Mr MoJo Risin

Sun has an 8-processor Opteron box. With top clocked x4 Opterons in it would I be able to hit a nice smooth 200 FPS in Crysis with full eye candy? Is there an after-market cooling solution to keep the machine's 1 meter SPL below perhaps 80 dB?

Which makes me curious ,

does anyone know what Suns plans are for Sparc based workstations ?

I think the U45 was the latest one, and thats been out for something like 2 years now

Dead I think. The whole UltraSPARC line is EOL or going EOL. The line up is T1/T2/T2+, Fujitsu SPARC64VI and AMD.

Apparently there's a single CPU quad core Fujitsu powered server coming, sometime in the summer.

The price/performance difference between the U40 and U45 is only going to get more embarrassing though, I think the end of SPARC workstations in on the way.

Treble SunRays all round!

They have EOL'ed the ultrasparc IIIi boxes (215,245,445). Their netra cousins are still alive but, I hope your software works well on a T1/T2 or be ready to pay the USIV or Netra tax going forward.

Care to provide actual data on that? I have a shed-load of both T1 and Opteron servers running constantly at high load and have had very limited hardware issues with them.

One huge disadvantage of Web2.0 is that comments like the first one are permitted without having to provide any accompanying evidence!

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/10/memorights-solid-state-drives-annihilate-every-hard-drive-out-there/

The difference between 1u and 2u is that the additional eight drives and IO slots need more physical space. We have loads of Sun x86 boxes running VMWare and the only problem is that they are very loud compared to our DELLs. These Sun servers have too much airflow and these sound like jet engines.

we would very happily consider buying the Sun machines as there's heavy discounting, try-before-buy etc. Snag is that we want the performance and capacity of 3.5" drives, whereas Sun and Dell have opted to use 2.5" drives in a lot of servers, HP have gone down that route too.

the irony is that has pushed us into buying commodity boxes from Tyan and Supermicro who do make nice 1U servers with 4 hot-swap SATA bays.

now, why aren't servers sexy enough to have a beach babe looking at one?

Does anyone know why server vendors are pushing 2.5" drives (SAS & SATA both) instead of 3.5" ? Clearly the 2.5" drives consume less power, but 3.5" drives have much better capacity. It seems to me you can fit more number of 2.5" drives of lower capacity versus less number of 3.5" drives of higher capacity - so what's the catch ?

BTW, if you need a sexy looking server, go for apple Xserve :-)

The T2/T2+ is a very nifty processor.

Actually, smaller drives are faster on seek times when they spin at the same speed (15K RPM). Distance to travel from the edge to edge is shorter. Plus, according to Seagate smaller drives are also more reliable. The only downside is a smaller capacity compared to 3.5" brethren.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/servers/savvio/savvio_15k/

One generally uses a SAN or a NAS. I know very few companies these days who store data on local drives. Local drives are just used for the OS and Swap