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April 10, 2012

Oracle first to release 10GbaseT as standard ?

Filed under: Networking — Tags: , , — Nate @ 2:21 pm

Sun has had some innovative x86-64 designs in the past, particularly on the AMD front. Of course Oracle dumped AMD a while back, and focus on Intel, despite that their market share continues to collapse (in good part probably because they screwed  over many of their partners from what I recall by going direct with so many customers, among other things).

In any case they launched a new server line up today, which otherwise is not really news since who uses Sun/Oracle x86-64 boxes anyways? But I thought the news was interesting since it seems to include 4 x 10GbaseT ports on board as standard.

Rear of Sun Fire X4170 M3 Server

The Sun Fire X4170 M3 and the X4270 M3 systems both appear to have quad port 10GbaseT on the motherboard. I haven’t heard of any other severs yet that have this as standard. Out of curioisity if you know of others I’d be interested to hear who they are.

The data sheet is kind of confusing, saying it has 4 onboard 10GbE ports but then it says Four 100/1,000/10 Base-T Ethernet ports in the network section below. Of course it was frequent to have 10/100/1000 BaseT before, so after seeing the physical rear of the system it seems convincing that they are using 10GbaseT.

Nice goin’ Oracle.

 

What’s wrong with this picture?

Filed under: Datacenter,Virtualization — Tags: , — Nate @ 7:36 am

I was reading this article from our friends at The Register which has this picture for an entry level FlexPod from NetApp/Cisco.

It just seems wrong. I mean the networking stuff. Given NetApp’s strong push for IP-based storage, one would think an entry level solution would simply have 2×48 port 10gig stackable switches, or whatever Cisco’s equivalent is(maybe this is it).

This solution is supposed to provide scalability for up to 1,000 users – what those 1,000 users are actually doing I have no idea, does it mean VDI? Database? web site users? File serving users? ?????????????

It’s also unclear in the article if this itself scales to that level or it just provides the minimum building blocks to scale to 1,000 users (I assume the latter) – and if so what does 1,000 user configuration look like? (or put another way how many users does the below picture support)

I’ll be the first to admit I’m ignorant as to the details and the reason why Cisco needs 3 different devices with these things but whatever the reason seems major overkill for an entry level solution assuming the usage of IP-based storage.

The new entry level flex pod

The choice of a NetApp FAS2000 array seems curious to me – at least given the fact that it does not appear to support that Flex Cache stuff which they like to tout so much.

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