Sun refreshes x86 machines

IN ADDITION TO the USIV+ boxes Sun launched yesterday, there are three x86 machines to go along with them. All support DDR2 and are based on the new AMD CPUs that coincidentally came out yesterday too. Wow, the timing is fantastic.

The boxes themselves are the Sun Fire X2100 M2 and Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers, and the Ultra 20 M2 workstation. The servers are aimed at HPC and large rack installations, with the X2100 being a 1U 1S computer and the X2200 a 1U 2S machine. Both can run Solaris 10, Windows or Linux, take your pick.

They are pretty cheap, the X2100 starts out at $945 and the X2200 runs $1595, but are not all that bare bones. Both come with integrated lights out boards and Sun will toss in the N1 manager for free, but you need to pay for support if you want it. Another really nice touch is 4 GigE ports as standard, Sun is all about this network thing, you might have heard that before though.

A quick check showed HP at about $100 more, but for some reason Dell would not let me configure an enterprise rack server without a Windows licence, putting it about $2500 more than the Sun box. Both HP and Dell were 'servers' based on Celeron Ds with single-channel memory, so I would avoid these like the plague, but the form factor was the same.

The workstation is another single-socket machine, not hugely remarkable except it starts out at $995. Once again, you can find HP and Dell machines for about the same money, but once you step up into dual cores, it blows the price from the latter two out by a huge amount.

The Sun machines ship with Solaris 10 for free, so there is no Windows tax, but you can opt for Red Hat or Suse if you choose. The Ultra 20 also comes with the full Sun Studio suite and dev tools for free - you can do things like that if you own the entire software stack.

Basically the new computers are a nice bump on the old, nothing that will redefine the space, just solid boxes at a low cost. It is interesting to see that Sun is now the low-price PC provider out there, usually beating out HP and Dell on similar configs. Oh, how times have changed. The other x86 machines in the Sun range are all set for a similar facelift later in the quarter. So, if you are interested, keep an eye peeled for that. µ