On Wed, 2010-11-10 at 23:47 +0100, Henning Brauer wrote: > * Scott Stanley <[email protected]> [2010-11-09 16:58]: > > I've heard a lot of praise for Sparc gear on this thread. Do many of > > you have much experience with Sun's amd gear? > > avoid at all cost > > > Anyway, I was considering buying a Sun Fire V20z (amd) as a home > > server, and would like to hear about any good or bad experiences with > > Sun+AMD (googling yields only media hype and performance reviews, but > > not real world stuff). > > the v20z is not really sun, that is newisys. might actually be usable. > > all real sun amd64/i386 gear i had my hands on over the previous years > was horrible. and that is mostly due to the management processors > being so incredibly bad. and you can't even turn it off on at least > some systems.
Unfortunately on the latest batch I've worked with I have to concur. I have about 150 SunFire X4400 and X2100 series system (they use Xenon not AMD, at least on the 4400) and they just plan suck. Fan indicator/PS failure lights on all the time and at least one memory problem on almost every system. I've come to the conclusion that most of these "problems" are with the embedded Linux service processor screwing up and reporting an error that may or may no exist. On top of that, I had about 20 of these service processors just flat out fail (entire logic board replacement). Everything on these systems depend on the SP working even the on off switch... Oh and to save money or something the cd drive in these things are attached to a USB bus and it doesn't appear to be v2.0... slow as hell and the internal connector fails all the time. They are also subcontracted out to some other manufacturer for Sun... can't remember what one. Run far away from these systems.
