The Sun Fire X4600 is a 4U rack-mounted server with support for four or eight processors and a maximum of 64GB of memory. There is room for four 2.5" SAS disks, four network ports of a gigabyte each, two USB ports at the front and another two at the rear. There is plenty of room for those who wish to plug in some extra cards, since six PCIe slots (four 8x and two 4x slots) and two 100MHz PCI-X slots are available. In principle, there is sufficient room in the casing for full-heigt cards, but in order to stick with a single standard across all servers, only low profile cards are supported. The motherboard uses a combination of an AMD 8132 PCI-X-tunnel and an nVidia nForce Pro 2200 chipset.
The machine has some quite remarkable design features: instead of having the processors sit on the motherboard, a blade system is used, with each of them housing a socket and four memory banks. This clever configuration keeps things compact while allowing the cooling fans to do their work.
The operating systems supported are Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Linux Enterprise Server, Vmware ESX Server, and Windows Server 2003. As may be expected of a system of this format, it can be fully administered remotely. The built-in 'service processor' can operate independently from the rest of the system, and can be reached via its own 100Mbit ethernet port or a serial connection. Administrators may use the built-in web interface or the standard protocols SNMP, IPMI, or DMTF.
Tweakers.net received the original Fire X4600 from Sun, fitted with eight 2,6GHz dual-core Opteron 885 processors and 32GB of DDR memory. There is a newer model, the X4600 M2 - with support for Socket F and up to 128GB of DDR2 memory, which isn't any more expensive than its predecessor and will hence be the better choice for most people. But the difference between the two is not really that big, so we think this review will be fairly representative. Pricing starts at 16,500 euros for a model with four 2.4GHz processors, 16GB of memory and a single 73GB hard disk. Our model, with eight 2,6GHz processors and 32GB is listed at 38,300 euros. To feed it energy, four 850 Watt power supplies are used, of which two can fail before the system gets into serious difficulty. The machine weighs almost 57 kilograms.
