Oracle’s Sun Blade X4-2B Server: Designed for Perfection
April 2014
Tech Giant Oracle (ORCL) recently beat Wall Street’s expectations for sales despite showing a slight drop compared with the same period in 2013. Although Oracle has been doing great on the hardware front, it faces stiff competition from cloud-based service providers. Oracle’s sun x86 server systems is the best platform for software. The server comes with optimized hardware and software stack in addition to virtualization software, operating system and cloud management tools. The optimization promises 10x performance gain in engineered systems.
X4-2B
The Sun Blade X4-2B Server Module is probably the best server that supports virtualized enterprise cloud infrastructure. Its flexible architecture allows quick deployment and almost zero downtime for I/O updates. A built-in PCIe Express module allows each blade to have a unique I/O configuration. Furthermore, management tools included as part of the package makes X4-2B cloud ready.
The Server sports an Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 v2 Product family and can house 2 processor units. As an upgrade to the Sun Blade X3-2B Server module, the X4-2B can support up to 24 cores. When it comes to built-in security, the Sun Blade X4-2B features Intel advanced encryption standard technology, Oracle Solaris trusted extensions and Process rights management among others.
X4-2B Server module has enough room for up to four 2.5 inch SAS disk drives, 4 SSDs besides supporting external storage. Virtualization tools like Oracle VM, Microsoft Hyper-V and Intel Virtualization Technology are part of the standard equipment. The Server Module also encompasses two links to Network Express Module slots, two 10/100/1000 Base-T Ethernet, two links to PCIe ExpressModule slots and one 10/100 Base-T Ethernet.
X3-2B Vs. X4-2B
The major difference between the 2 modules is the Processor architecture. While X3-2B supports up to 16 cores and can compute a maximum of 32 threads, X4-2B can accommodate 24 cores and compute 48 threads.
