Yesterday Sun announced three new super fast, super cool and super efficient servers - the Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200.

Sun Fire X4100


These are all x86 machines with AMD Opteron CPU's and are certified to run Solaris, Redhat and Suse Linux and even Windows - of course they come pre-installed with Solaris 10, but who wants to use a substandard OS on such an awesome machine anyway?

Sun has sold x86 boxes before, but these are different as they are designed in-house courtesy of the skills of company co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim and his team and are an indication of things to come. No, Sun isn't going to get rid of the SPARC CPU's in favour of AMD CPU's, but we are finding more ways of cutting costs and thus making the machines cheaper for customer. For example the cases on these machines will be shared with the upcoming Niagara-based servers.

I could go into all the technical details of what these machines offer, but I'm not in marketing or sales, so people can check this out for themselves on the announcement page along with all the other stuff announced yesterday.

What I do find really cool about these machines are the statements we can officially make about these machines:

- They are simply FASTER than ANY other vendor's systems
- 1.5 times faster than Dell, HP, IBM's Xeon based systems
- Minimally 10% faster than ANY other Opteron system
- Delivers more features in smaller space than ANY other Opteron system from HP, IBM or others
- Nearly 66% more energy efficient
- 1/4 the size of an equivalent HP machine
- 1/2 the price of a Dell.

We finally appear to be doing some good marketing about it too - this was taken by a Dell employee from their car park, and here we have some of the ads we weren't allowed to run.

All I want now if for all the sysadmins out there to go out and buy loads of these and the upcoming Niagra servers so we can make a profit and I can get a pay rise. Oh yes, and please buy our shares too.