The only factor missing from the comparison on the previous page is the operating system. The UltraSparc T1 server of this review was tested with the latest version of Sun's own Solaris 10. To keep things fair, we installed the same OS on the Opteron, but curious as we are, we wanted to know the difference in performance between Solaris and Linux. We picked Ubuntu server edition, but did not succeed getting it to work on the T2000. This means that we only have results for the Opteron, but these tell an interesting story by themselves: concurrencies of 15 and above made Solaris between 6% and 14% quicker than Linux, running PostgreSQL and MySQL, respectively. Quite remarkably, the latter does show a higher performance peak running Linux.
For completeness, it should be noted that we did not succeed in getting the X4200's integrated SAS-controller to work under Linux, so instead we used a separate Areca 1120 card with a couple of Raptors. According to our disk expert Femme this set-up ought to perform better, but since no RAID was used and the system had 8GB of memory (with disk activity already very low on 4GB), we believe its influence will have been minimal.