Sun's W2100z Dual Opteron Workstation

Conclusions

Sun is a high end name, and with a high end price, you also get high end service and documentation. Sun has an excellent forum and user community, although discussions regarding Opteron workstations are fairly limited thus far. Solaris and JDS have their own unique support systems and user communities as well.

The thermal and sonic performance of the w2100z can only be described as a design win. Although Sun sacrifices our ability to incorporate multiple hard drives into the workstation by permitting only two (safely), we passively cool the entire rig well within thermal thresholds. The result is an extremely quiet workstation.

While we enjoyed out first look at the Sun w2100z, all of our testing and analyses are without a competitive solution to use for comparison. We expect this article to be the first in a set of many Linux/BSD based workstations, and we are excited about getting the Sun w2100z some competition - particularly since the next iteration of 2.6GHz Opteron processors are on the way. As you may have noticed, almost all of our benchmarks are platform independent as well; don't be surprised if an EM64T Linux, 64-bit Windows or Mac system competes head-to-head with our Sun in the future.

Although we only had a few benchmarks of Solaris 10 in this analysis, we hope to include more in the future, particularly when Janus support is fully integrated into the kernel. Thus far, we have not run enough tests on Solaris to provide conclusive results on performance.
There were no instances where the w2100z performed poorer than our whitebox configuration, including sonic and thermal testing. Let's consider how pricing modifies our final thoughts. Looking through NewEgg for each of the components used in our whitebox configuration, we made the chart below.

Whitebox		Sun w2100z
Opteron 250	$854.00
Opteron 250	$854.00
Tyan K8S Pro	$490.00
Kingston 1GB DDR	$314
Kingston 1GB DDR	$314
Kingston 1GB DDR	$314
Kingston 1GB DDR	$314
Quanta Altas 73GB	$250.00
GeForce Quadro FX3000	$1,300.00
Keyboard	$20
Mouse	$20
CDR Drive	$40
Case, Power Supply	$200
Approximate Total	$5,284.00	$8,695.00

Keep in mind that the Tyan K8S Pro comes with an integrated Adaptec dual channel SCSI adaptor and Broadcom gigabit Ethernet. Our whitebox configuration weighs in almost $3,000 cheaper than our Sun workstation, although this may be a bit misleading - we are not comparing apples to apples here. The whitebox Opteron system is a noisy rackmount server, and the w2100z is a high performance premium workstation. The w2100z comes with Sun backed support and software updates (not to mention free JDS), and our whitebox configuration is not even guaranteed to work under Linux.

Apple systems work well because they were designed from the beginning to work with each other. The same can be said for the Sun configuration. Heatsinks, CPU mezzanine, daughterboards are all designed and configured to work with each other, and as a result, we see higher performance, lower thermals and quiet cooling. IBM's IntelliStation A Pro 6224 (with a similar configuration) costs just $8500 with dual Opteron 248's installed; it is not available with the faster 2.4GHz Opteron 250's featured on the w2100z. HP does not offer Opteron workstations yet, although pricing out an equivalent 4U rackmount server with the same options runs in the five-digit figures. Sun does not pre-install the OS on its workstation like some of its competitors, but it is guaranteed to work with Solaris and RedHat distributions. Other solutions like Appro are priced competitively with the w2100z, but can't provide support infrastructure that we have with Sun. Ironic as it sounds, Sun is the inexpensive leader in Opteron workstation design. However, keep in mind that upgrading components for a workstation like the w2100z requires you to go through Sun (if you want to continue receiving support) - which can be costly.

There was a time when embracing Linux and x86_64 were two things that nobody expected from Sun. Memories of SGI's unwillingness to adapt to competitive (although probably not as efficient) architectures and operating systems remain fresh in everyone's minds. The lack of x86_64 Solaris and JDS thus far both indicate that Sun's interests in 64-bit SPARC are still prevalent, but small steps are better than no steps at all.

Ultimately, AMD and Sun benefit together in this new architecture endeavor. Sun and AMD research teams work closely together, and as a result, Sun can produce excellent workstations while AMD gains insight on processor and thermal design. PA-RISC, Power4 and SPARC architectures all have significant advantages over the x86 platform, with the exception of price. Seeing Sun, HP and IBM working together with AMD to advance x86 benefits us all in bringing affordable 64-bit computing to everyone.