The Sun Fire X4500 data server (code named Thumper) integrates server and storage technologies. It was announced in July, 2006 and is part of the Sun Fire server line from

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

. In July 2008, Sun announced the X4540 model (code-named Thor), which doubles the processing power of the X4500. In November 2010, Oracle designated that the X4540 is end-of-life and has no next-generation replacement model.

Development

Thumper was developed by

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

based company Kealia inc. Kealia was founded in 2001 by

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

professor

David Cheriton David Ross Cheriton (born March 29, 1951) is a Canadian computer scientist, businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group. ...

and Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. When Sun bought Kealia in 2004, Thumper became the basis for the X4500 model.

Hardware

The Sun Fire X4500 supports two dual-core

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

Opteron processors and up to 64 GB RAM. With forty-eight 500/1000/2000 GB

SATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard ...

drives, it provides up to 96 TB of raw storage in four rack units. The Sun Fire X4540 supports two quad- or six-core AMD K10 (Barcelona) processors and up to 128 GB RAM. The new model also uses

PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as Peripher ...

IO technology, and added a

compact flash CompactFlash (CF) is a flash memory mass storage device used mainly in portable electronic devices. The format was specified and the devices were first manufactured by SanDisk in 1994. CompactFlash became one of the most successful of the ea ...

disk slot for booting the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

. A significant feature of both systems is that the I/O framework was designed to handle high throughput on all disks simultaneously. These were the first systems designed specifically with

ZFS ZFS (previously Zettabyte File System) is a file system with Volume manager, volume management capabilities. It began as part of the Sun Microsystems Solaris (operating system), Solaris operating system in 2001. Large parts of Solaris, includin ...

in mind, so no hardware

RAID RAID (; redundant array of inexpensive disks or redundant array of independent disks) is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical Computer data storage, data storage components into one or more logical units for th ...

is included.

Supported operating systems

* Solaris 10 *

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial Linux distribution developed by Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Fedora Linux and ...

4.0 *

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) is a Linux-based operating system developed by SUSE. It is available in two editions, suffixed with Server (SLES) for servers and mainframes, and Desktop (SLED) for workstations and desktop computers. Its major ve ...

10 *

Rocks Cluster Distribution Rocks Cluster Distribution (originally NPACI Rocks) is a Linux distribution intended for high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. It was started by National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure and the San Diego Supercompute ...

* Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (Standard and Enterprise) * Microsoft Windows Server 2008 *FreeNAS 9.3 - newer do not work

Products using X4500/X4540

* Sun Streaming System * Sun Visualization System * Sun Secure Data Retrieval Server (SDRS) * Sun Constellation System * Sun StorageTek Virtual Tape Library Value ("VTL Value") System * Sun Scalable Storage Cluster * Luminex Virtual Tape Solution for IBM zSeries mainframes via FICON * SAS Intelligence Storage *

Greenplum Greenplum is a big data technology based on MPP architecture and the Postgres open source database technology. The technology was created by a company of the same name headquartered in San Mateo, California around 2005. Greenplum was acquire ...

's Sun Data Warehouse Appliance * IPConfigure - Enterprise Surveillance Manager * G10 Enterprise Video Manager * Media Server for Symantec Veritas NetBackup * Cypress Storage Appliance *

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

Forty-two Sun Fire X4500 data servers are used to provide Lustre cluster filesystem storage in the TSUBAME supercomputer, which was number 7 in June 2006

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

list.

TPC-H World Record

In October 2007, Sun submitted TPC-H result with an X4500 running Sybase IQ. At US $8.11/QphH, it achieved the best price/performance among the 1,000 GB results.

References

External links

Sun Fire X4500 Server

Sun Fire X4540 Server

Sun Fire X4640 Server

Sun Fire X4500 System Walkthrough
an
Part 2
(

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

Video)
Sun Fire x4500 demonstration
- Andy Bechtolsheim demonstrating the 4500 hardware, Menlo Park Ca, 11 July 2006
Configuring the Sun Fire X4500 Server as Network Attached Archival Storage for Symantec Enterprise Vault
{{Sun Microsystems Sun servers Data storage servers Computer-related introductions in 2006