One of the issues I encountered with the X4500 was very simple: how to find one drive in the sea of disks inside the box. For Solaris and Linux, a simple utility called "hd" creates an ASCII map of the internal drive layout, showing the device address of each physical drive. Without this utility, locating a single disk would be maddening.

The Bottom Line Sun Fire X4500 Server Sun Microsystems, sun.com Excellent  8.8 criteria score weight Configuration 8 20% Management 9 20% Performance 9 20% Scalability 9 20% Security 9 10% Value 9 10% Cost: As tested with 24TB raw storage, $51,995 Platforms: Solaris, Red Hat Linux, Windows Bottom Line: The X4500 is nicknamed the Thumper for a reason – 48 SATA drives in a single 4U chassis accompanying a dual-Opteron server with two PCI-X slots. There’s no hardware RAID, however, and running anything but Solaris with ZFS is going to artificially hamstring the box. It’s not going to supplant the SAN anytime soon, but the X4500 will certainly make waves. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

File system exercises
I first ran tests under ZFS, running OpenSolaris b57 on the X4500. Creating a file system of all 46 data drives was the work of a few seconds; creating mountpoints, iSCSI targets, and NFS and Samba shares took a few more minutes. All told, the process of turning the X4500 from a standard Solaris server into a very high-capacity NAS was as quick as that of any canned NAS solution on the market, but without built-in extras such as replication (although ZFS can be configured to perform this task).

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By contrast, when running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, simply creating a software RAID of 16 drives took well over four hours between file system creation and RAID initialization. Only 16 drives were used in order to stay under the ext3's 8TB limit. Performance under ZFS was also higher, with reads well over 600MBps and writes in the 150MBps range as measured with Bonnie++ running on the local system. Under Linux, the performance was high but couldn't match those numbers.

As an NAS device, the X4500's performance was limited by protocol and Ethernet bandwidth limits, with NFS tests showing reads in the 90MBps range, with writes about 85MBps. iSCSI numbers were better, nearing the 120MBps limit of a single gigabit link for reads and 100MBps streaming writes at a fixed block size. As with all I/O benchmarks, changing the block size results in different numbers, so actual performance will be specific to the application used.

ZFS is key to top performance
Suffice it to say that Thumper is aptly named and is a truly unique product from a company that seems to be pulling away from a faltering reputation in the server market. Recent studies have shown that within a few short years, the world will generate more data than it can store. It would seem that Sun is doing its part to bridge that gap.

ZFS and the X4500 go hand in hand, seemingly created for each other in a love story rivaling anything that's come out of Hollywood in the past 10 years. The speed of file system creation and raw I/O possible with ZFS surpasses that of any other file system available today, and truly makes the X4500 usable in enterprise settings.

On the other hand, using the X4500 with anything but Solaris and ZFS really isn't a viable option at this point. It will work, but it'll be problematic. Once FreeBSD has a stable ZFS implementation, it will fit right in, but for now, the message is clear: Although it's possible to run the X4500 under other operating systems, Solaris will give you much more bang for the buck.