Hi guys,

I am a new member here. This is my first post.
I try to purchase some new Blade 2500 for the
company. However, the vendor suggests me to get Blade 2000 instead. The vendor said he has many problems
with new Silver Blade 2500’s. Has anyone here had
simlar experience with blade 2500?

Thanks in advance


John

I´ve searched the SUN support site (sunsolve) with my SUN partner account (I "see" almost everything even internal documents) and there is no entry about the blade 2500 to have any problems right now...

I think its save to buy a Blade 2500.

Blade 1000/2000:

If you want to sign a support contract with SUN to support the workstations , I wouldnt buy the blade 1000/2000 since the contract is really expensive.
I think the blade 1000/2000 ist the "more advanced" workstation (SUN Fire 280R in a workstation case) in comparison with the blade 2500.

The Blade 1000/2000 has UltraSPARC III CPUs up to 2x1,2Ghz with 8MB Cache and the Blade 2500 has UltraSPARC IIIi with up to 2x1,6Ghz with 1MB Cache.
Blade 1000/2000 has space for two internal Fibre Channel Drives (FC-AL) in a 1Gbit/s FC-AL Disk Subsystem powered by an onboard Qlogic FC Controller while the 2500 has an Ultra160 SCSI backplane for two U320 disks.
You will get the same performance on the internal disks I think.
Supported are 72GB FC-AL disks in the 1000/2000 and 146GB SCSI disks in the 2500, but also 2x300GB FC-AL works fine in the blade 1000/2000 and
2x300GB SCSI works in the 2500.

When you not gonna sign a contract I would buy the Blade 1000/2000 with two CPUs and 2-4GB of RAM. With the 1000/2000 you have an SF280R under your desk. (BTW: I own a blade 1000 with 2x750Mhz,4GB RAM,2x72GB disks and I´m really happy with this workstation ! It runs just fine and realtively fast)

The other side of the knife with 1000/2000 is the expensive spare part list.
When a CPU breaks you have to investigate around 4000-5500 $ to get a new one from SUN, or you pay around 500-1000$ to get one off ebay.
Same with the FC-AL Disks , one 72GB has a list price of around 2.500$ !!


greets

networkfre@k

Thanks a lot. It is very informational.
I think I will get balde 2000 since I do not need
service contract.

Thanks again

I thought the Blade 1000/2000's were End Of Lifed? We have both were I work at and we upgraded our workstations from 2000 to 2500. I think the 2500 are better myself.

Right, Blade 1000/2000 are end-of-life.

But you can buy those workstations as "refurbished" from SUN, so the workstations are in a really good condition, but the price is also SUN-like.

I think its a matter of the main applications you want to run on the workstation.
3D will be much faster on the Blade 2500 while lot of number chrunching "should"
be faster on the UltraSPARC III based workstations.

greets