So we're evaluating the Sun Fire X4600 and Netra X4200 this month, along with the HP ProLiant DL365. The ProLiant and the Netra are pretty decent boxes, and would be excellent workhorses for your front-end app. The X4600 is what we're drooling over however. With the ability to power 8 dual-core Opterons (and quad-core when they're available), and 256 GB of memory, this baby is begging for virtualization. It's nice that we're also evaluating both Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX 3.5 this month too. Whoo hoo!

The Fire X4600 has a very nice modular design. You can buy it with 2 to 8 modules and each module holds a dual-core processor and up to 32 GB of memory. Ours only has 8 dual-core procs and 32 GB's of memory total, but that is more than enough for what we're planning on testing it with. Here's a closer look at the module.



That big copper heatsink sits on top of the CPU.