Sun SunFire V240
As to be expected from a highly proprietary manufacturer, the SunFire V240 is a physically very impressive machine. Its 2U rackmount chassis has a muted purple flip-down front panel and a charcoal lid. Beneath the flip-down panel are four removable hard disk drive (HDD) bays. Also contained behind the front panel are a small management switch (key operated), a card reader (for the system configuration card), and a power button. The front panel does not lock at all, nor does any of the drive bays, so this equipment would need to be stored in a secured rack. The rear of the unit has redundant hot-swappable power supplies. And for all those Sun novices reading this, note the absence of keyboard, mouse, or monitor ports because this is a server and technically all good servers should be remotely accessible for all management and administration tasks via IP telnet or SSH sessions. And at the end of the day, if you do need direct access to the machine, nothing stops the system administrator from connecting via the
Internally (yes we couldn't wait to get our heads under the hood either) the server has plenty of space, once the large air baffle has been removed that is. Each CPU is slightly offset from each other with its own bank of four memory slots next door. The construction is excellent. All cables are neatly routed and guided to their respective ports. There is also a neatly engineered sliding rail support system for overlong expansion cards.
The Sun v240 only has two processors and is not quad capable. The processors are 1GHz UltraSparc IIIi. And these are heavy weight CPUs--while physically not much larger than your average CPU, they weigh a whopping 57g (without the external heatsink) and have 959 pins each. The system we were supplied with had eight 512MB memory modules, so a total of 4GB RAM.
The operating system is Sun Solaris 9. The configuration is relatively easy, initial connection is via a terminal console such as hyperterminal and a serial cable. Once the IP addresses have been configured, then as with any terminal-based system you can telnet or SSH to the system and complete configuration from that stage.
Overall this is a very neat package. No real complaints from us. The only thing for potential technicians looking to deploy Sun equipment is ensure you are versed in the Solaris OS and the technical details of how to set up and configure these machines. However any technically competent engineer with some level of IT networking experience should not have too much trouble deploying these machines.
| Product | Sun SunFire V240 |
| Price | From $6280-$19,574; as tested $15,454 |
| Vendor | Sun Microsystems |
| Phone | 03 9869 6200 |
| Web | www.sun.com/servers |
| Interoperability |  |
| Relatively hard to comment on interoperabilty; the Solaris OS is robust. | |
| Futureproofing |  |
| Performance is very good. Upgrade path is relatively straightforward, redundancy is included. | |
| ROI |
|
| Fair price for a decent server with very good performance. | |
| Service |  ½ |
| Three years warranty is great, but particularly the gold and platinum extra coverage get very expensive. | |
| Rating |  ½ |
I saw a better Quad Opteron server platform from a manufacturer in Taiwan, looks like a great server, you can visit http://www.genesysrack.com.tw for a look, I hope somebody can supply this chaassis in Sydney.