I've read a lot of sites lately talking about how great the Sun Fire X4500 (AKA "Thumper") is. It's a 4U server that you can shove 48 500GB hard drives into. It also has a pair of dual core 2.6 GHz Opterons and 16GB of RAM in its standard config, so it can do quite a bit of heavy computing too. It's a big, fast server with ridiculous amounts of storage, packed into a relatively small space.
But, like most Sun stuff I've seen, it's damn expensive. The configuration I mentioned above costs about $70k, according to the online Sun store (see a screenshot I made here if you don't believe me). Buying a ten pack will set you back $471k, so you get a nice discount buying in bulk at least. I've read that calling up Sun and haggling is definitely a good idea, but I haven't tried this myself.
Paul Murphy and Jason Hoffman both posted recently about these things being a great deal. Murphy's post gets the price totally wrong (he says $33,000, which is how much Sun used to sell a 12TB model for I believe, but now all they list is the $70,000 24TB one:
Then he goes on to say how they're cheaper than buying an Apple Xserve with Xserve RAID. This is plain wrong because of his mis-pricing of the Thumper, but I think it's kind of a silly comparison since the hardware is rather different.
I decided I'd price a much more comparable server from a vendor I like a lot, Silicon Mechanics. Here is the server I configured from them:
For $15,301 you get a 3U box with two dual core 2.6 GHz Opteron 285s (same as Thumper), 16GB of RAM (same as Thumper), 4 gigabit ethernet ports (again same as Thumper), 16x750GB SATA hard drives (only 12TB, half of Thumper's 24). It's also got hardware RAID with battery backed cache if you'd like to use that, or you could probably just run Solaris on it and use raidz like people seem to do with the Thumper. Need all of that 24TB? Ok, buy two. Then you get twice as much memory, CPU, etc. and multiple machines. Massive hardware failure in one won't take out all of your available storage. Sure two of SiMech's machines take up 6U instead of 4, but I'll take a little extra rack space (and power usage probably) over spending nearly $40,000 more. And if you really want to spend a lot of money, why not buy four of SiMech's boxes and just use two for redundancy? Four times $15,301 is still a lot less than $69,995.
I just don't get the hype. Thumpers are too expensive.
