Sun Fire X4500
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The Sun Fire X4500 data server (code named Thumper) integrates server and storage technologies. It was announced in July, 2006 and is part of the Sun Fire server line from
Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...
. In July 2008, Sun announced the X4540 model (code-named Thor), which doubles the processing power of the X4500. In November 2010, Oracle designated that the X4540 is end-of-life and has no next-generation replacement model.


Development

Thumper was developed by
Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...
based company Kealia inc. Kealia was founded in 2001 by
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
professor
David Cheriton David Ross Cheriton (born March 29, 1951) is a Canadian computer scientist, mathematician, billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the ...
and Sun co-founder
Andy Bechtolsheim Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim (born 30 September 1955) is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer. His net worth ...
. When Sun bought Kealia in 2004, Thumper became the basis for the X4500 model.


Hardware

The Sun Fire X4500 supports two dual-core AMD
Opteron Opteron is AMD's x86 former server and workstation processor line, and was the first processor which supported the AMD64 instruction set architecture (known generically as x86-64 or AMD64). It was released on April 22, 2003, with the ''Sledg ...
processors and up to 64 GB RAM. With forty-eight 500/1000/2000 GB
SATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...
drives, it provides up to 96 TB of raw storage in four
rack unit A rack unit (abbreviated U or RU) is a unit of measure defined as . It is most frequently used as a measurement of the overall height of 19-inch and 23-inch rack frames, as well as the height of equipment that mounts in these frames, whereby th ...
s. The Sun Fire X4540 supports two quad- or six-core
AMD K10 The AMD Family 10h, or K10, is a microprocessor microarchitecture by AMD based on the K8 microarchitecture. Though there were once reports that the K10 had been canceled,
(Barcelona) processors and up to 128 GB RAM. The new model also uses
PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...
IO technology, and added a
compact flash CompactFlash (CF) is a flash memory mass storage device used mainly in portable electronic devices. The format was specified and the devices were first manufactured by SanDisk in 1994. CompactFlash became one of the most successful of the e ...
disk slot for booting the
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
. A significant feature of both systems is that the I/O framework was designed to handle high throughput on all disks simultaneously. These were the first systems designed specifically with ZFS in mind, so no hardware
RAID Raid, RAID or Raids may refer to: Attack * Raid (military), a sudden attack behind the enemy's lines without the intention of holding ground * Corporate raid, a type of hostile takeover in business * Panty raid, a prankish raid by male college ...
is included.


Supported operating systems

* Solaris 10 *
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop ...
4.0 *
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SUSE Linux Enterprise (often abbreviated to SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop com ...
10 *
Rocks Cluster Distribution Rocks Cluster Distribution (originally NPACI Rocks) is a Linux distribution intended for high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. It was started by National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure and the San Diego Supercompute ...
*
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003 is the sixth version of Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on March 28, 2003 and generally available on April 24, ...
(Standard and Enterprise) *
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008 is the fourth release of the Windows Server operating system produced by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of the operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008, and generally to retail on F ...
*FreeNAS 9.3 - newer do not work


Products using X4500/X4540

* Sun Streaming System *
Sun Visualization System Sun Visualization System was a sharable visualization product introduced by Sun Microsystems in January 2007. It used other Sun technologies, including Sun servers, Solaris, Sun Ray Ultra-Thin Clients, and Sun Grid Engine. The Sun Visualization S ...
* Sun Secure Data Retrieval Server (SDRS) * Sun Constellation System * Sun StorageTek Virtual Tape Library Value ("VTL Value") System * Sun Scalable Storage Cluster * Luminex Virtual Tape Solution for IBM zSeries mainframes via FICON * SAS Intelligence Storage *
Greenplum Greenplum is a big data technology based on MPP architecture and the Postgres open source database technology. The technology was created by a company of the same name headquartered in San Mateo, California around 2005. Greenplum was acquired ...
's Sun Data Warehouse Appliance * IPConfigure - Enterprise Surveillance Manager * G10 Enterprise Video Manager * Media Server for Symantec Veritas NetBackup * Cypress Storage Appliance *
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...
Forty-two Sun Fire X4500 data servers are used to provide Lustre cluster filesystem storage in the TSUBAME supercomputer, which was number 7 in June 2006
TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coinci ...
list.


TPC-H World Record

In October 2007, Sun submitted TPC-H result with an X4500 running
Sybase IQ SAP IQ (formerly known as SAP Sybase IQ or Sybase IQ; IQ for Intelligent Query) is a column-based, petabyte scale, relational database software system used for business intelligence, data warehousing, and data marts. Produced by Sybase Inc., ...
. At US $8.11/QphH, it achieved the best price/performance among the 1,000 GB results.


References


External links


Sun Fire X4500 Server

Sun Fire X4540 Server

Sun Fire X4640 Server

Sun Fire X4500 System Walkthrough
an
Part 2
(
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Video)
Sun Fire x4500 demonstration
- Andy Bechtolsheim demonstrating the 4500 hardware, Menlo Park Ca, 11 July 2006
Configuring the Sun Fire X4500 Server as Network Attached Archival Storage for Symantec Enterprise Vault
{{Sun Microsystems Sun servers