Sun Fire X4500

Lore & Background

The Sun Fire X4500 was developed by Kealia Inc., a Palo Alto, California-based company founded in 2001 by Stanford University professor David Cheriton and Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. When Sun acquired Kealia in 2004, Thumper became the basis for the X4500 model. The system supported two dual-core AMD Opteron processors and up to 64 GB RAM, with forty-eight SATA drives providing up to 96 TB of raw storage in four rack units. A significant feature was that the I/O framework was designed to handle high throughput on all disks simultaneously. These were the first systems designed specifically with ZFS in mind, so no hardware RAID was included. Supported operating systems included Solaris 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, Rocks Cluster Distribution, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008, and FreeNAS 9.3 (newer versions do not work). In July 2008, Sun announced the X4540 model (code-named Thor), which doubled the processing power of the X4500. In November 2010, Oracle designated the X4540 as end-of-life with no next-generation replacement model.

Reader's Guide

The Sun Fire X4500's significance lies in its pioneering integration of high-density storage and server processing in a single chassis, a design that influenced later storage server architectures. Its I/O framework, optimized for simultaneous high throughput across all disks, made it suitable for data-intensive workloads such as Lustre cluster filesystem storage—forty-two X4500 units were used in the TSUBAME supercomputer, ranked number 7 in the June 2006 TOP500 list. The system's ZFS-first design, eschewing hardware RAID, anticipated the shift toward software-defined storage. In October 2007, an X4500 running Sybase IQ achieved the best price/performance among 1,000 GB TPC-H results at US $8.11/QphH. The X4500 and its successor X4540 were used in a variety of products, including the Sun Streaming System, Sun Visualization System, Sun Secure Data Retrieval Server, Sun Constellation System, Sun StorageTek Virtual Tape Library Value System, Sun Scalable Storage Cluster, and third-party solutions such as Greenplum's Sun Data Warehouse Appliance, IPConfigure Enterprise Surveillance Manager, and the Internet Archive. The X4540's end-of-life designation by Oracle in November 2010 marked the conclusion of the product line without a direct replacement.

Did You Know?

• The Sun Fire X4500 was code-named Thumper and developed by Kealia Inc., founded by David Cheriton and Andy Bechtolsheim.
• Forty-two Sun Fire X4500 servers provided Lustre cluster filesystem storage for the TSUBAME supercomputer, ranked number 7 in the June 2006 TOP500 list.
• The X4540 model (Thor) doubled the processing power of the X4500 and added a compact flash disk slot for booting the operating system.