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Sun Breaks the Price Barrier

By Brian Wilson

I must admit my fondness for Sun hardware. I ran my Web server on an old Sun 3/80 for a couple of years, and it just cranked along. No crashes, no reboots. It was too slow to use as a workstation but it made a fine Web/email server. I've seen many a venerable Sparc 2 pressed into service as NFS, email, and Web servers, long after similarly aged PCs would have been retired. Sun hardware has been very reliable for me.

Unfortunately, although they have long life spans, Suns also have big price tags. The cheapest Ultra 5 and 10 workstations run from $2000 to $4000, which would buy a lot of Intel PCs these days. Recently, however, Sun broke the price barrier when it introduced the Netra X1 rack-mount server and its cousin, the Blade 100 Workstation, at $995 each. For this review, I put the Netra X1 through its paces.

A Look Inside

I was immediately struck by how compact the 1U case is; it's just 13" deep. I paused to consider the possibility that Sun has been listening to people who use rack mount servers. Netra X1 comes with tabs you can move to center or front mount it. It has indicator lights on both the front and rear panels. The serial ports use RJ45 connectors, so you can use cat 5 network cables to connect them directly to a terminal server.

Sun Netra X11U Sparc Server