I thought this was funny… taken from the latest Driver/BIOS CD:
Sun Fire X4150 Remote Firmware Update procedures
=======================================================================
NOTE: To update the BIOS and SP for the Sun Fire X4150, the onboard CPLD *MUST* be updated first.
This necessary update adds required functionality to allow the BIOS fo function with the new range of Intel Processors.
Procedure to Update the CPLD:
-----------------------------
.....
7. Once the firmware is uploaded, you will be asked to remove AC power for 10 seconds to allow the CPLD to be loaded.
Spiffy… a “remote” procedure that requires the removal of AC power. So this is only really a “remote” proceedure when you have an APC MasterSwitch or similar PDU.
The latest Sun offerings continue to greatly irritate me. Quad-Core AMD’s are finally available, and their SunFire X4440 is impressive, offering 4 AMD sockets in 2U, allowing for up to 16 cores per system with as much as 64GB of RAM, and to make things even more sweet, they have a promo whereby a fully stocked X4440 can be had for only $13,400. But, alas, it still has onboard NVIDIA GIgabit Ethernet interfaces which I still dislike, and while the Product Notes mention both LSI MegaSAS RAID Controllers and Sun StorageTek (read: Adaptec) RAID Controllers there isn’t any mention of which one is included nor is it clear when buying saying simply “HBA RAID Card”. On the upshot at least it has ILOM, a real SP, as opposed to the X4150′s which still only have the worthless ELOM.
Read my lips Sun… NO MORE ADAPTEC. NO MORE NGE. NO MORE ELOM. Please, oh please please please. These things are for workstations, not enterprise class servers. Its bad enough that there aren’t 3.5″ Drive options, given that we’re limited to only 146GB drives in a 2.5″ form factor, but I’m hoping that will wash out in a year when we get >300GB 2.5″ 10K RPM SAS disks. Stick with LSI MegaSAS, with E1000g and with ILOM.
I’ll simply note, as a share holder… Sun gives away all its software and produces systems inferior to Dell and IBM. Um…. thats really bad. I am 110% behind Open Source software, no one should question that, but Sun moving all software behind that model was based on an assumption that its server sales would increase to make up the difference and software would increasingly push hardware sales. I’m nervous. We’ve got to concentrate on superior systems with vastly superior management solutions that are integrated more tightly. Right now Sun’s software stack is too fractured, from software deployment to identify management, its a big hodge podge, not an integrated stack.
As a fellow shareholder, I too am very concerned. I bought more with the post-earnings plunge to 12.50, but will look to lighten up at 13.50. What do you think of Ultrasparc CMT going forward?
I think the Niagra UltraSPARC development is still coming along nicely, but the market for those is relatively small and most adopters that I have experience with have had more enthusiasm than success.
Sun wanted to jump into the X86 market and innovate. To some extent they have succeeded… the X4500 is innovative, the X4600 is innovative, but what they lack is a high volume workhorse like the Dell 2950′s. X4100′s were great but they botched those systems with the M2 refresh. The rest of the “workhorse grade” systems (X41xx/X42xx/X44xx) in the current lineup are all premature for the reasons I noted in the post.
There are many options for Sun, one would be getting into the half-depth systems like Rackable and others have to increase density, which they clearly can do given the form factor of the “head” (server component) in the X4500.
Hope isn’t lost, but it seems like Sun is tripping over itself.
We’ve got to make the SunFire systems the best in the market, we’ve got to build a really solid and integrated “out of the box” management solution that rivals RLX ControlTower (now HP) and Dell OpenManage, and better integrate infrastructure components like Sun’s Identity Suite offerings into Solaris so it “just works”.
> management solution
Sun and management solutions just don’t mix. When has Sun ever created good management software?
Good OS Yes
Good SPARC servers YES!
Good Management software NO! ie N1, wait for N2
I work for a large geophysical company, it’s been a sun shop for over 20 years. My department supports a lot of sun hardware both workstations and servers.
Our experiences with the new Sun AMD based desktop hardware have been pretty bad. Our ultra40 workstations have endless problems with the video cards, memory and motherboards. I have never seen this high of a failure rate in an any brand name workstation. To top it all off they come with a 1 year warranty, which means every $1450 motherboard or $850 video card is coming out of the company’s pockets.
And they’re not cheap, for that kind of money you expect a quality product with a 3 year warranty. Meanwhile the old Sparc based workstations just keep chugging along with no problems.
It’s unfortunate but I don’t think our department will be purchasing Sun workstations this fall when we refresh our desktop hardware. It used to be that having a Sun workstation meant something, sure you paid more for them but they were ultra reliable workhorses. Now it seems sun workstations are just run of the mill generic PC’s with sub-standard hardware and a sun FRU number to double the price. The 64bit workstations we have from HP and Dell are significantly cheaper, more reliable and come with a 3 year warranty,
I can’t imagine my manager or the bean counters that have been paying for the replacement parts would want to buy them again.
The new BIOS/SP-Version (1.3.1) is the first usable one, because it resets the serial port to the only clever default: 9600, 8n1 on ttya. Version 1.2 used 9600 on ttyb and the older versions were even worse, they wanted to talk with 115200 8n1 on ttya. That means, you have to adjust this speed setting in your OS: menu.lst, bootenv.rc, asy.conf and console-login.xml have to be changed.
Can you elaborate on what an “out of the box management solution” would look like to you? I have no experience with RLX ControlTower or Dell OpenManage.
What do you think of xVM Ops Center?
We have had a few x4200’s pass through our doors recently which were decidedly ‘meh’ in terms of build quality/support – given a choice, we go with other vendors.
We recently started looking into a Sun software product, half expecting to have to buy Sun hardware to support it (for the full Sun support stack). Imagine our suprise when we were told they will be just as happy supporting the software on Dell/Linux kit…
For enterprise software, multi-platform support is important – I understand why they have to support Win/Lin too. But without a compelling “added value” reason to go with Sun hardware, I fear they will continue to be pushed out of the martket by the other tin vendors.
You’re so scaring me. I’ve been running Sun / Sparc for 15 years and now my company is jumping on the x86 / Linux train. We’re going to port Oracle’s E-Business Suite to Linux. We’re also receiving competative quotes from Dell and HP too. Dell is the x86 incumbent so I have to work my @ss off selling Sun x86 internally to upper management. Naturally then, I find myself wondering: “Why am I so hell bent on Sun anyway?” It would be much easier to simply buy Dellware. I think it’s because Sun’s ‘different’ and can generate some excitement and enthusiasm among the other technical staff. If I bring in more Dell hardware, I get a “meh” reaction. When I say Sun x86, everyone responds: “Cool, can’t wait to get my hands on it”. I so hope we don’t become a “meh, Sun” shop :-/
I’m also in a shop where we’ve been using Sun / Sparc for around 12 years, but our company has always been heterogeneous with AIX (LOL) plus Dell/HP for Windows. While I’m not as much of a Solaris fanatic as some of you guys (I started with Linux and BSD back in ’94), I originally came here explicitly to work on Solaris and I definitely toot the Sun horn. I am also a SUNW – ahem – JAVA shareholder.
The company has been purchasing Dell 2950s for the past year for VMware, Linux, and Wintel servers but there has been a movement to bring in more Sun x86 servers for at least Linux and VMware. We have a few x4150s in house now and, I must say, I generally prefer the Dell servers. The Sun servers appear to be more fragile as we’ve had more than a handful of I/O-related hardware failures. I’m sure this is an anomaly, but we have yet to have one hardware failure over the past year in the 25+ Dell 2950s that I support which run Linux or VMware (where I only support the Linux VMs). I also prefer the Dell 15k RPM disk capability and have grown to trust PERC.
On a tangent, the I/O failures (on both these x86 servers and on CoolThreads servers like the t2000 and t5220) have nearly turned me off of ZFS. Perhaps we’ve been simply incredibly unlucky, but I’m going to have to say this stuff just doesn’t cut it. Always trusting Sun to deliver STABILITY first, we jumped in headfirst with ZFS since the very first release it was available. We also purchased 3 Thumpers in the past year or so since we’ve been such firm believers. In my experience, ZFS doesn’t deal with hardware problems gracefully at all, it’s been the cause of at least a handful of system crashes. To add insult to injury, it’s WAY more complex than LVM/partitions under the covers so trying to recover from a few failures has been quite an ordeal. In the past 12 years of Sun Support, I’ve never been told to rebuild a system from scratch when using plain UFS, Veritas Volume Manager, or Disksuite/Sun LVM. It’s happened TWICE with ZFS, and we have no system-related filesystems on ZFS! While there was a time when I was DYING for ZFS on root, it’s come to the point where I suspect we may never trust it enough for that.
Sorry for the rambling, but I’m a bit distracted since I’m also in the midst of a support case with Sun dealing with – you got it – an I/O problem on an x4500.
Please don’t get me started on ILOM or ELOM. Both are a joke. The SPARC ALOM and SC suited us fine and it’s disgusting to see the downgrade they made on new servers.
Ben,
It seems Sun has been rushing a lot of products to the market recently half-baked. I love the X4150 as a computer…its screaming fast for a 1u box (or even a 4u box for that matter). But it is a PINA to get set up (and I fear getting the 2am call that it’s down). I agree completely with you about ELOM. Solaris 10 seemed half baked when it came out as was (is?) the LDOM software. I guess it’s better then nothing but I wish they’d slap a “beta” brand on a lot of this stuff so people don’t think it is production ready….heck I still don’t think ZFS is production ready (though I love it).
It would be great if an accountable Sun manager would comment on this topic of product dilution. The general sentiment of this comment’s list makes me want to put my life savings in Jan 2010 put options and wait for the company to sink itself so that I can treat myself to an early retirement.
Oh! Wonderful job!
Very interesting and useful post.
Thx, your blog in my Google reader now
Reading all these posts I’m scared for the future of Sun and my beloved Solaris/SPARC shop I work in. I have trusted Solaris/SPARC for 15 years now but have a data center full of aging servers that I don’t know what to replace them with. We’ve used T1000/T2000 with mixed results (due to the non-threaded nature of the workloads) and have bet on T5220 for a new OracleRAC environment. However, I’m starting feel like my shop is getting out of the mainstream and that more and more shops like mine have headed to the Dell/Linux solution. We have purchased a single Sun Intel quad socket, dual core based system think this might be our future platform of choice but based on the comments above I’m not sure where to go from here… Can anyone relate?
Hi Ben,
What is it that’s so bad about NGE? Performance? Reliability? Manageability? Not questioning your judgement, just want to know more about the issue. NVIDIA, as you probably know, is highly revered in the kingdom of geek but perhaps they don’t do LANs well?
Hi Frank,
I am also using a T5220 for an Oracle/WebLogic deployment in cluster mode. Personally I would have preferred to go with an M-series server for it’s simpler processor model. I’m just curious as to what information you were able to get hold off that convinced you that a T5220 was suitable for Oracle, as to date I am still not convinced.
Jeroen
Naturally I would prefer my company to stay on SPARC. We’re an Oracle shop running on v440′s. I’d love to migrate to either T2+ or M-series servers too. Unfortunately for T2+ our production app (oracle e-bus suite) is still mainly coded for single threads. The payroll module is optimized for parallel / distributed threads, but that’s about it. So, T2+ is off the list. Next, the M-series is too cost prohibative. The cost of four M4000 vs. four X4150 is a simple decision. Sun might be content / happy that customers are moving to x86 as long as it’s Sun x86, but the decision to go to sun x86 is NOT an easy one. As I mentioned earlier I’m am FIGHTING tooth and nail to get my company to acknowledge Sun as a viable x86 alternative. Enterprise Sparc has always been about uptime and being able to handle massive load. I really haven’t seen this in my years. Yes, sparc can handle the load without a server crash. Likewise, it’s great when a true enterprise system doesn’t crash because one cpu is offline allowing you to schedule maintenance. However, our E3500′s v440′s v240′s, v210′s have all had their share of stability problems. and now I have to admit to myself and my boss that all four of my dell precision workstations that run high load 24×7 for the past 6 years have had zero unscheduled downtime. I’m going to keep drinking the Sun Kool-Aid and hope for the best.
I am about to throw a couple x4150s out the window. On one, the cdrom drive only seems to work half the time and an OS installation has hung right in the middle. On the other, the adaptec bios array configuration has hung right after I configured the volumes and exited (stuck at the ‘rebooting the system’ message).
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