Sun brings Opterons to telecoms

SUN IS PUSHING its Opteron boxes into a new area, telecoms. This means long life, hardened boxes, and of course, certifications until you get bored and then some. Welcome to the new Netra x86 boxes.

The first new box is called the Netra X4200 M2, and it is based on the 68W Opteron 2214AT pulled from the AMD embedded roadmap. The embedded parts were chosen because of the longevity, not for any sinister reason. The case is also shortened from the usual 25 inches to 20 so it will fit in a telecom equipement rack. It is more or less the standard 2U Netra chassis you may have seen stuffed with SPARC innards.

It can take up to 4 146GB SAS drives and 32GB of memory, nothing horribly out of line there. They also come in AC or DC variants, something you don't see in most server lines. These are serious telecom parts, not off the shelf rack servers.

To get that status, you need to do two thing, make sure the boxes live forever and get certified, recertified and certified again. The long life bit should not be much of a problem, Sun has been doing this for a long time, so they probably have a good handle on the parts, cooling, and general black arts that go into telecom boxes.

Slightly more stringent is the requirement for NEBS compliance. You can read all about it here, but the short story is no certificate, no telecom people will take you seriously.

Sun has sent the Netra X4200 M2 off to a third party testing house and will guarantee that they make NEBS level 3 compliance. This is not a light duty rubber stamp, if you get this, you are in good with a lot of people. That said, it isn't an easy thing to do.

The Netra X4200 M2 is available now. It is a 2 socket model and costs a mere $9845 for the base model. This will be followed by a 1S version in May that will only cost $6145. Both will take the Sun Neptune card. µ