Is your SMB looking for more hardware oomph than one of the workhorses reviewed here can provide? Or maybe you'd like to see just how much you can stuff into a 1U chassis? Well, check out Sun's brand new Sun Fire X4150. Apple may have made waves recently with the ultra-slim MacBook Air, but it practically emptied out the case to get it that small. Sun has kept its new Sun Fire in a 1U enclosure but has sacrificed absolutely nothing in the way of hardware or management features, building a box capable of competing with servers twice its size.

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I had to journey to the wastelands of wintry New Hampshire to get my hands on this gleaming example of hardware goodness, where it had just been delivered to a production network environment, the admin of which owes me favors. But it was worth the trip.

The most basic configuration of Sun Fire is a mere dual-core Intel CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a single SAS hard disk for $2,495. But the one I fondled came equipped with two quad-core Intel Xeons of the E5450 variety, running at 2.83 GHz. It also had a whopping 16GB of RAM and four 136GB 10,000-rpm SAS drives attached to an Adaptec RAID controller. And that's not even the most souped-up possible config: Since Sun has standardized on 2.5-inch SAS drives, the Sun Fire had room for four more drives—and the RAM complement could have stretched to 64GB! That's enough to make even the Aberdeen Stirling sweat.

Even then, the Sun Fire also has room for three PCI Express expansion slots, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, another 10/100 Ethernet port dedicated to management functions, dual redundant power supplies, and five USB ports, including one internally that's there to run a hypervisor boot stick, in case your virtualization proclivities lean that way—oh yeah, and a DVD-ROM drive, too. Okay, it costs $13,041.95, but remember, all this is happening in just 1U of rack space.

The Sun Fire uses the Intel E-class CPU, a power- and cooling-optimized case design, and smart hardware management to position the Sun Fire as one of the greenest servers of 2008. The key factor in that strategy is a fully 64-bit-capable server with enough memory and disk space to run a heavy virtualization load in half of the space you'll find in most other server solutions.

It's also surprisingly standard at a component level, considering how much engineering Sun had to do to cram this much stuff into such a small space. Sun shipped the box with Solaris preinstalled, but after installing the Sun Fire on the network we were able to wipe the disk, rebuild the RAID array with Adaptec's command line utility, and install the Linux-based CentOS with no hiccups whatsoever. Sun spokespeople weren't surprised, and commented that the Sun Fire is certified to run several operating systems, including Solaris, any Linux flavor, and Windows Server 2003, as well as the current VMware hypervisor environment.

For logistical reasons, we didn't run the Sun Fire through the same benchmark test suite as the other systems in this roundup, but in any case, its configuration was simply too far off the charts for a fair comparison. Suffice it to say, the Sun box would have blown the doors off anything else here—but then again, the other servers weren't designed for this kind of duty. Of the review systems in this roundup, only the Aberdeen had as much hardware potential as the Sun Fire, though HP was about to announce a RAM upgrade to the DL380 G5 that would have allowed it to scale to 64GB as well. That and its eight SAS bays would have allowed it to compete with the Sun Fire X4150, no problem. Even so, Sun still deserves kudos for managing all this in a box this small.

Benchmark Test Results
Check out the SMB Sever test scores.