The Sun Fire X4500 data server (code named Thumper) integrates server and storage technologies. It was announced in July, 2006[1] and is part of the Sun Fire server line from Sun Microsystems.
In July 2008, Sun announced the X4540 model (code-named Thor), which doubles the processing power of the X4500.
In November 2010, Oracle designated that the X4540 is end-of-life and has no next-generation replacement model.[2]
The Sun Fire X4500 supports two dual-core AMDOpteron processors and up to 64 GB RAM. With forty-eight 500/1000/2000 GB SATA drives, it provides up to 96 TB of raw storage in four rack units.
The Sun Fire X4540 supports two quad- or six-core AMD K10 (Barcelona) processors and up to 128 GB RAM. The new model also uses PCI Express IO technology, and added a compact flash disk slot for booting the operating system.
A significant feature of both systems is that the I/O framework was designed to handle high throughput on all disks simultaneously. These were the first systems designed specifically with ZFS in mind, so no hardware RAID is included.
Forty-two Sun Fire X4500 data servers are used to provide Lustre cluster filesystem storage in the TSUBAME supercomputer,[21] which was number 7 in June 2006 TOP500 list.
TPC-H World Record
In October 2007, Sun submitted TPC-H result with an X4500 running Sybase IQ. At US $8.11/QphH, it achieved the best price/performance among the 1,000 GB results.[22]