The New Center of Sun's Universe

摘要

In response to the market's dual-core mania, Sun is releasing its new Opteron-powered Galaxy line of rack-mount dual-core servers, intended to augment its Sun Fire line of x86-based machines. The question is: Given Sun Fire's somewhat lackluster popularity record, will the Galaxy fare any better among customers looking to stick with Sun? We did our best to answer this puzzler by giving a preproduction Galaxy 1 — graciously provided by Sun — a test drive. Unfortunately, the Galaxy's pre-production demons proved a bit too much for a truly deep evaluation, so much so that we can't score the product until we get a shipping model. Even at this raw stage, however, it's obvious that Sun has put quite a bit of physical engineering effort into making the Galaxy line a good rack-and-datacenter citizen.