Common Questions about the Sun X2100 Server

Now I cannot say that I have personally had a number of questions about this specifically. Still, I will not deny that there are certainly some attractive benefits here…

The Sun Fire X2100 Server attracts a lot of interest, and rightly so. But I commonly get asked the same questions over and over, and some of the answers aren’t ones that Sun really likes to answer, so I’ll do it for them.

“Wow! Only $740!?! Whats the catch?” There isn’t really a catch, but you need to know that the $740 model doesn’t include hard drives or the DVD drive. For $740 you get an AMD Opteron Model 146 (2.0GHz, 1MB cache) and 512MB of RAM. If you want Dual-Core and 2GB your looking at $1,895.00, which also includes 1 drive.

Now, you need to understand something about this box. Its designed to be an HPC compute node, which is why it by default it ships with no drives and rather than a traditional PCI slot its got an 8x PCIe. If you you want 100 nodes connected using Infiniband or Dolphin SCI, then this is the box for you.

“I’d rather buy my own 500GB SATA drives for my X2100 but I’m worried about having SPUD brackets.” I thought this very thing myself! On the Ultra 20’s this is a problem because if you want to add a second disk (it comes with 1 by default) you need to buy a SPUD (the drive clip thingie) in order to mount the drive. Good news! Unlike older SPARC blanks, the “filler” SPUD’s aren’t welded, which means that you can simply remove the blank brackets, unscrew the filler plate with a phillips screw driver, and then mount your own drive.

NOTE! If you choose to buy a bare-bones X2100 don’t forget to buy the DVD drive! While you can insert your own SATA disks, you can’t insert your own DVD drive, so I highly recommend you buy it at a minimum, and remember that it doesn’t come by default…. Source: cuddletech.com

[tags]dvd drive,sun x2100 server,spud,sata disks[/tags]