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Spec'ing out Sun's X4100 & X4200 servers, head-to-head against HP's
DL145/385/585 Opteron offerings. However it appears that the v20z/v240z
match up better. The X4x00 have dual-core, newer and in-house
architecture, etc. which is nice, but in the small business sector,
we'd like to have an OS disk array and an application/small database
disk array. In this space, this is a more relevant need than having 4
GB ethernet ports, etc. We already have and can get the SmartArray
battery-backed cards on HP, and use U320 disks upto 300 GB each (for
example, a 2-disk OS array, and a 4 disk application array on DL385).
In contrast, it looks like the X4x00 are limited to 4X SAS disks (146
GB available, but Sun Store only has 73 GB). I suppose the expansion
options are to add an U320 or FC adapter and an external disk array, or
get an iSCSI NAS.

Sun has targeted the X4x00 towards app, database, etc. servers,
presumably in the small business market (because of the price point,
and because they are comparing to Dell), but these boxes seem to be
designed to be pure compute nodes, needing external storage to be
proper app or database servers; and their storage boxes start at $10k
once you get to a 4X 300 GB, which you can get by adding 4 300 GB disks
at $989 each (without discount) to an HP DL385.

Unfortunately trying to make a case for Sun is steering us towards HP;
so I'd love to hear about how the Suns can be made competitive in this
space. Thanks.