[dundee] Opinions on the Sun Ultra 24 Box - Good bang-per-buck?

[Rick Moynihan]

2008/4/24 Andrew Clayton <andrew at digital-domain.net>:
> On Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:06:04 +0100, Rick Moynihan wrote:
>
>  > Hey, everyone.
>  >
>  > My development machine (at work) is getting a little bit long in
>  > the-tooth (being a modest 4 year old machine), and I'm considering
>  > upgrading.
>  >
>  > I was just wondering on whether anyone had any opinions on the
>  > bang-per-buck of the Sun Ultra 24 box?
>  >
>  > http://uk.sun.com/catalog/?n-state=http://catalog.sun.com/productinfo.xml?site%3dUNITEDKGB%26catalogue%3dFC%26segment%3dFC_R%26item%3dFC_SC_CAT%26group%3d2005%26fid%3d5090%26id%3d15078%26partnerid%3dunitedkingdomcontext~~~G!06D635ED06CD!WBPkexcnEpBE33lB~standard~ws-nocache~~@http://syndicator.sun-catalogue.com/ukunited/unitedkingdomcontext
>  >
>  > At about £1300 for an Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme Processor it seems
>  > pretty decent, but I've not really been following hardware over the
>  > past year?  I don't mind paying slightly over the odds for Sun kit, as
>  > experience has shown it to be many times more reliable than anything
>  > else I've seen.
>
>  Would that still hold out for their PC based stuff?, where all the bits
>  likely come from the same place anyways...

Yes, I'd expect it to.

Sun have some excellent engineers and I'd expect they even work on
commodity boxes such as this.  As an example, we have some old Sun
blade 150's, sure, they're SPARC based but they're otherwise commodity
machines, with PCI cards, IDE hard disks etc...  I've lost count of
the times that we've had power surges etc, where every other machine
in the building has rebooted, and we've found machines with fried
hardware (disks, cdroms, PSU's etc...).  The 3 Sun machines have
*NEVER* batted an eyelid and out of all the hardware we have they've
continued running without ever experiencing a hardware problem.  Other
boxes from other vendors haven't lasted a third of the time of the Sun
blades.

I'm no hardware engineer, but I suspect most other manufacturers of
occaisionally mixing the VW Mini parts with those from Ferrari.  Sun
tend to build big, ugly, clunky machines which are reliable, and built
to last.

>  > The machine will primarily be used as a desktop workstation, for
>  > software development.
>  >
>  > So, I want something that is:
>  >
>  > 0) Runs Linux.
>  > 1) Bloody quick at compiling (mostly Java apps)
>  > 2) Got enough oomph to occaisionally support virtualisation of Windows
>  > XP (mainly for Software testing)
>  > 3) Got enough oomph to support a couple of virtual Linux servers
>  > running simultaneously (again for testing).
>  > 3) Is multi-core - (as we've written some pretty thread intensive
>  > software) 4) Is also great for web-browsing and good for more typical
>  > desktop workloads. 5) Can easily handle dual-head monitors 1280x1024
>  > (it'd also be nice to support higher resolutions in the future)
>  >
>  > The spec is:
>  >
>  > Sun Ultra 24 Workstation,
>  > 1 Intel Core2 Quad Extreme QX6850 3.0 GHz,
>  > 2 GB Memory,
>  > 1 x 250 GB SATA Disk Drive,
>  > NVS290 Graphics,
>  > 1 DVD-Dual,
>  > 1 x 10/100/1000 BaseT Ethernet Port,
>  > 2 x 1394 Firewire, Audio, 6 USB2.0 Ports, 2 Full-Length PCI Slots, 4
>  > PCI Express slots,
>  > Solaris Licence, Solaris 10 Operating System and Sun Development Tools
>  > Preinstalled, RoHS-6 Compliant
>  >
>  > I can imagine I'll be primarily running Ubuntu (which has also been
>  > certified by Canonical on this machine), and perhaps occaisionally
>  > Windows.  I'd probably leave Solaris 10 on, incase I ever fancy
>  > testing under it (and perhaps using dtrace! :-) )
>  >
>  > Concerns.
>  >
>  > 1) Is the graphics card any good?  I don't care for games, but I hate
>  > seeing screen updates!  And how does it compare to the Nvidia Quadro
>  > FX 370???
>
>  Personally, until Nvidia get their head out of their arse, I'd avoid
>  Nvidia gfx.

Are you referring to their proprietary binary drivers and attitude to
Linux here, or something else?

>  > 2) Is 2gig adequate for typical use + some background virtualisation
>  > (of pretty minimal machines) + Netbeans & java development?  I suspect
>  > it'd easily handle it, but that 4gig would be better...
>
>  From experience you'll probably want at least 128-256MB per VM. So yeah
>  a few VM's and you should still have plenty of RAM.
>
>
>  > 3) Is quad extreme noticably better than the intel core 2 quad?
>
>  Don't know
>

Cheers,

R.