P.S. Can anyone make an island out of Portugal?

“The Sun Fire X4240, powered by the AMD Opteron 2200 and 2300 processor series, is a two-socket, 8-core, 2RU system with up to twice the memory and storage capacity of any system in its class. It’s the first and only two-socket AMD Opteron system with sixteen hard drive slots in a 2RU form factor.”

Well, now that I work for Sun, it ends up being a shameless ad and boasting :) But back when I saw information about this product, I wasn’t my first thought was “wow, thats the best machine for scaling up scaled out environments!”.

In web database world people agree that number of spindles (disks!) matters – remember YouTube’s “think disks, not servers” mantra said during the scaling panel at MySQL conference. Before, getting such number of spindles would’ve required external arrays taking space and sucking power (TCO! ;-)

And for us… it probably means we can finally start doing RAID10, instead of RAID0. :-)

By the way, that box even has Quad-Core service processor. Way to go! :)