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Thumpers are a better deal than "cheap" Apple XRaids

By Jason Hoffman 7 November 06

Using some of my numbers, Paul Murphy points out:

“In other words real results with the ZFS/X4500 combination easily exceed Apple’s marketing claims – and you get two thirds more disk for $4,000 less.”

when comparing Apple XServes+XRaid as a low-costs server+storage combination to the Sun x4500s.

A damning line is:

“Apple went from market leading performance for less than Dell and Sun to market trailing performance for more than Dell and Sun.”


  1. But the real question is: do thumpers smell as good as Apple hardware? Nobody forgets their first Apple laptop’s smell.

    — Jemaleddin    744 days ago    #

  2. The question is will the xraids ever look as sexy as the thumpers?

    — Jacques Marneweck    744 days ago    #

  3. I’m a little confused, because I went to Sun’s site and found the Fire X4500 (that’s the Thumper, right?), and one page listed the price as $33,000, but when you click through into the store the price changes to starting at $70,000. Am I missing something here?

    — slippySt3    743 days ago    #

  4. Hey, I’m with slippySt3. As my boss said:

    24TB for $32K is pretty awesome.

    What gives?

    — Tom    743 days ago    #

  5. It depends on what and how many drives you have in it + what “deal” you can get.

    Don’t use the sun store for anything other than figuring out the maximum price.

    — Jason Hoffman    743 days ago    #

  6. So, how do you find out what “deal” you can get? Do you have to call them up?

    — Anson    742 days ago    #

  7. I work for a Sun reseller. Initially there were two versions of X4500; one with 48×250GB drives and the other with 48×500GB drives. The 12TB version was in the $30K range but was “transitioned” this week. It’s no longer available and the given reason was that the vendor of the 250GB drives had EOL’ed them. The 24TB model is still available but with a list price at $70K.

    — Mark G.    740 days ago    #

  8. We’ve been trying like heck to get a thumper at work, but have had no luck. We ended up buying some compaq server and will try out OpenSolaris on it.

    — Joe    731 days ago    #

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