New and Updated Barcelona Boxes Debut from Sun

Socket And Plug In an effort to expand its footprint in the X64 server space and use every advantage it can bring to bear on customer sales, server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems last week officially rolled out an updated "Galaxy" X64 server line based on the "Barcelona" quad-core Opteron 2000 and 8000 series. The revamping of the Galaxy line includes three new machines, two of which are akin to existing designs already launched using Intel Xeon processors, as well as updates to two existing Galaxy products. The two Opteron servers are the Sun Fire X4140, a 1U, two-socket box, and the X4440, a 2U, four socket box. According to David Simmons, senior product line director for X64 servers at Sun, the machines are basically the same chassis as the already-launched Sun Fire X4150 and X4450 servers. The big difference is that the Opteron machines use chipsets from nVidia while the Xeon boxes use chipsets from Intel itself. The X4140 and X4150 machines have room for up to eight 2.5-inch SAS drives (six with a DVD drive), and have four Gigabit Ethernet ports and three PCI-Express slots; the X4140 supports up to 64 GB of main memory using 4 GB DIMMs. The X4440 is a taller two-socket box that has the same eight or 10 2.5-inch SAS drive slots, but it supports up to 128 GB of main memory using 4 GB DIMMs. That extra space is for cooling the memory and presumably to allow faster and hotter chips to run more comfortably. The truly new box that Sun announced last week, the X4240, is a variant of the X4440 chassis that puts a tiny air intake grill front and center at the top of the machine and then allows customers to plug as many as 16 of the 2.5-inch SAS drives into the front of the chassis. (The X4440 has the grill across the whole top of the box.) Other than this, the motherboard seems to be the same as used in the X4440.