Sun x86 Servers

Sun x86 Servers

The Sun x86 server family encompasses many different models of Sun servers, in both blade server and rack server designs, and can also be referred to as the X series. No matter the design, all Sun x86 servers feature built-in virtualization technology, high scalability and other performance features that allow them to excel at enterprise virtualization and consolidation applications. As enterprise-level consolidation solutions, Sun x86 servers are optimized to run one of three Oracle operating systems (OS): Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris or Oracle VM. However, Sun x86 servers are also certified for support of 3^rd party OS types including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise, Windows Server and VMware. However, it is the type of processors that truly define an x86 server since a server can only be categorized as a member of the Sun x86 server family if it is equipped with Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors, versus SPARC or other processor types.

Some examples of Sun x86 rack server models include Sun Fire X2270 M2s, Sun Fire X4170 M2s, Sun Fire X4800 M2s, while some examples of Sun x86 blade servers include Sun Blade X6270 M2s and Sun X6275 M2s. Some advantages that both of these Sun x86 server designs offer include simplified management through the integration software such as Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM), and the fact that Sun is the sole hardware vendor to provide comprehensive application to disk solutions through the utilization of built-in system virtualization and management software such as ILOM. Furthermore, Sun x86 servers offer performance leadership with multiple world-record industry benchmarks, one of which is Oracle’s Exadata V2 software, which boasts the claim of being the fastest On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) and data warehousing system currently available in the world.