Sun gives servers an Opteron quad job

Sun has been sluggish to release servers based on AMD's four-core Opteron processors, but today it got around to the quad job.

The vendor is releasing three new servers with the latest Opterons, and also fitting the chips into five systems previously announced.

Sun trails a gaggle of major server vendors like Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and IBM that have already announced support for the processors, as well as smaller firms like Rackable, Supermicro and Appro.

To be perfectly fair though, Sun has made it fairly obvious where the new Opterons will go by putting new servers on its site as early as last month. It just never made the effort of saying they would be receiving the four-core parts.

So here we go: "officially" unveiled in Sun's x86-64-bit server line are the Sun Fire X4140, the X4240, and the X4440.

Sun Fire X4440

The 1U Sun Fire X4140 is equipped with eight disk drives, and the 2U Sun Fire X4240 has 16 drives. Both support a maximum of 64GB memory and are suited to function as mini-storage systems for database, HPC and warehousing applications, according to Sun.

Sun claims its new X4440 server offers the highest memory capacity for a 2U, 4-socket server. The box has 32 DDR2 DIMM slots (eight per CPU socket) for a maximum 128GB of memory. Sun cheers that all that available memory makes the box just terrific for virtualization. The server has eight disk drives available.

Additional systems available now with quad-core Opteron chips are the Sun Fire X2200 M2, the X4100 M2, and the X4200 M2 servers. The Sun Fire X4600 M2 and the Sun Blade X8440 with quad-core Opterons are expected to be available by the end of the quarter. ®