4 ms·

The Sun X4500 "thumper" server had 48 drives, if I remember correctly, and came out in 2006ish. It had hot-swap SATA disks (up to 512GB disks initially!) and w

• zrail 5y ago
  IIRC the company I was at at the time had a set of thumpers for something. Maybe a SAN? They were incredibly cool for the time.
• dekhn 5y ago
  I remember when I worked in a company that was a netapp shop, and in 2007, they sent one of the ZFS developers and andy bechtolsheim to sell us thumper and ZFS. The developer and I had a spirited discussion of the relative merits of having volume management built into the filesystem. At the time I advised my company to skip the storage servers (which were overdesigned IMHO, but were unquestionably stout hardware) but that ZFS was an interesting filesystem to explore.
• mattst88 5y ago
  Hah! That was the system my small university IT department bought to act as a storage server. Actually they bought 2, with one to act as a backup. Unfortunately for them, no one knew how to administrate Solaris, so they... installed Windows. No idea if they actually succeeded in doing anything useful with the systems.
• midasuni 5y ago
  Bought three with 1TB drives and ZFS. Wasn’t cheap. Hardware was great, but no linux/zfs support meant we didn’t stick with it. A couple of years later we had standardised on supermicros with a similar density and ran linux on them. Sun lost a fair amount of money from us (7 figures) by choosing not to embrace linux.