Newly announced x86 products

At first: The maximum memory sizes in this article calculated with 8 GByte DIMMS. There are other vendors using 16 GByte DIMMS for their max memory numbers, albeit those DIMMs are currently not available for purchase (and would ruin you in any case ).

Rack server

The most interesting system from my perspective was the introduction of the X4800. This system is a 8-socket Xeon 7600 system with up to 1 TB of memory on 128 DIMM-sockets. You can use 4 or 8 procs. It's a glueless design.

So you should use a system that handles the NUMAness of a system well (like Solaris), at 8 sockets there may be more than just one hop to your memory. However using something like a crossbar would introduce additional latency to every hop. In addition to the usual hot-swappiness of x86 system you have hot-swapable service processor as well as hot-swapable I/O. 10 GbE is part of the NEMs you are using to provide basic I/O. You will find the datasheet of the systeme here.

With the X4470 there is finally a new system in the 4-socket Intel x86 class as the X4450 got a little bit old. Three rack units, 10 PCIe 2.0 slots, up to an half terabyte of memory.

It's a little bit larger than the older 4-socket class (2 RU) but has much more I/O. You will find the datasheet at the Oracle Website.

The X4270M2 is the new offering in the 2-socket class. 2RU in two diskplane configs: One with 12 3,5" drive slots and one with 24 2.5" drive slots.

You will find additional info in the datasheet again.

At last there is a new X4170M2. 2 sockets for Xeon 5600 procs, up to 144 GB and 8 2.5" disk as described on Oracles webpage.

Blades

The new X6270 M2 blade provides two 6-core Nehalems. Up to 144 GB of memory, four disks on blade. It provides PCIe 2.0 to the slots of the blade.

Additionally there is a new switch blade for the Blade 6000 chassis. It provides 14 10 GbE ports. 12 are aggregated to 3 QSFP, so you could use a single cable for four 10 GbE uplinks when you complement this NEM with the new switch of Oracle.

The virtualized multifabric NEM (the Hydra NEM)was upgraded, too ... it now provides SAS2 and a private mode to provide an 10 GbE interconnect between the blades without outbound ports to an outside network..


Finally there is a new disk blade for the shelf. In addition to SAS2 it now provides dynamic zoning and most important 24 slots for FMods. Looks like a good use for all the space left unoccupied in the old storage blade. However it looks like this FMOD slots aren't supported initially. At least they aren't mentioned in the datasheet.

Networking

A little bit unexpected for most people is the a new kind of components in the Sun product portfolio. It's the Sun Network 10GbE Switch 72p. It's a 10 GbE switch on 1 RU with 72 ports. The switch uses the same trick like our Infiniband switches to create such a port density. There are four ports on 16 QSFP-ports. Should reduce the amount of cabling a lot.