Hi,

I would just like to know if most Sun Servers that run Solaris, are loud or not?

In other words, I mean those High end Mission critical servers like here:
http://www.sun.com/servers/index.jsp

Are these really noisy at all??

So, do these really belong in a server room separate from most office-like enviroments??

Because our corporation is planning to get one these really soon.

So, should these be placed in like a server room due to noise issues?

Loud? Depends. I'm guessing that they will be quieter than the ones I share my office with. ;-)

Typically, fans are the loudest items. Sun servers have always had good cooling. That means a bit more noise. I have a recollection of a time when the marketing group at a company I worked for decided to go out and buy their own external drives. Prices were coming down and so on. They exclaimed how happy they were with the quietness of the drives. Turns out the fans weren't drawing enough air and all the drives failed in about 9 months. After that, we had a technician replace all the fans with higher quality fans (more air draw, more noise).

Sun has cut the power requirements for these servers. That translates directly into lowered cooling needs. And that translates into less need for really beefy fans.

So, I share my office with an E250 among other things (couple generations old, but still a really nice server). That has a fan assembly with 3 large fans as well as a cooling fan over the CPU. It's a noticeable constant hum that some people would find irritating. But it's quieter than the A/C unit (I don't ever turn on the heat in my office). I have Bose noise canceling headphones that really cut the fan noise.

I haven't met a Sun server yet that wasn't loud :-) The smaller the box, the louder they are (smaller fans at high RPM are much more annoying than large fans at a lower RPM).

But, have you met the new ones that he's talking about? Cool Threads -- marketing yes, but the point is less energy draw, lower cooling requirements.

If you check the tech specs, there is a section called "Declared Acoustics" with both idle and spun-up levels.