SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server
Redefines Midrange Enterprise Computing with Industry-Leading Price Points, Power Management and Multiple World Record Benchmarks
The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server is a 4-socket system, based on the UltraSPARC T2 Plus architecture, in a compact 4U package with up to 256-threads (32 cores)and 512 GB of memory.
"Sun is dramatically changing IT economics and delivering enormous value to the midrange market that could not come at a more critical time," said John Fowler, EVP, Systems Group, Sun . "The Solaris-based SPARC Enterprise T5440 server offers incredible performance on a completely different curve in a footprint that's half the size of the competition. For customers, it all comes down to faster, smaller, greener, better. And with the built-in virtualization of Solaris, they can save even more."
Once again, BM Seer brings to the reader's attention another notable achievement of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server with four 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, which achieved 7520 SD benchmark users on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard SAP ERP 6.0 (2005) application benchmark with over 37,000 SAPS.
Ever alert to the benchmarking results achieved by Sun solutions, BM Seer has posted links in his blog to the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 world record Siebel performance. He notes that Oracle typically didn't allow vendors to do public comparisons; then points out that anyone can do the math with the data from Oracle's website and draw the appropriate conclusions.
A single Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server in the database tier with four 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors delivered a single system World Record result of 5836.15 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard while using the Oracle WebLogic 10.3 Application Server and Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition.
OpenSolaris Ignite
A Monthly Newsletter by, for, and About the OpenSolaris Community, Featuring News, How-To Articles, Tech Tips and Reviews
Those interested in OpenSolaris are now invited to subscribe to OpenSolaris Ignite, the newsletter for the OpenSolaris user community. Each monthly issue will come packed with what's happening with OpenSolaris such as:
Proximity communication is a Sun Microsystems technology for wireless chip-to-chip communications that has been developed in part by Robert Drost and Ivan Sutherland in the course of their research on the High Productivity Computing Systems for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Proximity communication, which replaces wires by capacitive coupling, promises significant increase in communications speed between chips in an electronic system, among other benefits.
In a recent blog Dean Nelson, Senior Director of Sun's Global Lab and Datacenter Design Services, outlines the plans for the upcoming Chill-Off 2. Nelson characterizes the strategy and project implementation for Chill-Off 2 as having a "much more aggressive goal" than last year.
"Solaris 10 runs on the major volume platforms in the industry: SPARC, Intel and AMD. Contrary to popular opinion, the SPARC architecture is not a proprietary architecture. It is an industry standard and open source architecture that anyone can replicate. On the other hand, the Intel X86 architecture is considered propriety and can only be replicated using an expensive and legally difficult clean room reverse engineering process," said Jim Laurent in his Weblog.
Here is yet another economy available from Sun, the Sun Identity Compliance Manager offering, which provides a portion of the existing Sun Role Manager functionality at a lower price point. It includes defined entitlements that grant the customer use of only the Compliance related functionality within Sun Role Manager 4.1. The Sun Identity Compliance Manager offering reduces the business risks and costs associated with enterprise access control through comprehensive identity auditing, access certification and policy enforcement.
Brian Leonard and Marina Sum report on installing Sun Web Stack on the OpenSolaris OS. The writers escort users through the relatively few simple steps involved in the installation of Sun Web Stack, which Sun shipped in July. The solution, available as part of the Image Packaging System (IPS) package, contains popular, preconfigured tools for developing and running applications.
Recently, Sun released Cool Stack 1.3.1. Shani, a Senior Staff Engineer in the Perormance & Applications Engineering Group (PAE),
reports, "This was the last release that was built to work on releases as old as Solaris 10 01/06 (Update 1). Going forward, future versions of the stack will only be supported on newer Solaris 10 updates. So I'd like to urge everyone who is running older releases to please schedule their systems for upgrade. We highly recommend that you upgrade to at least Solaris 10 01/08 (Update 5) as it has many performance, security and other fixes."
He continues, "to enable a unified stack, we are now transitioning Cool Stack to Sun Web Stack. This new stack was announced
in OSCON in July. It will be very similar to Cool Stack in that it will be separately downloadable but it will be a full-fledged product in that customers who want production support, can now purchase it. The stack will continue to be available free of charge with limited support via a forum."
The first version of Sun Web Stack will be 1.4 (keeping the Cool Stack versioning in place) and should be available in November.
Sun announced five new world record results on industry-standard benchmarks using x64 servers based on Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron architectures, powered by the Solaris and Linux. Sun is setting the bar by posting the first-ever submissions on two new benchmarks from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) - SPECjvm2008 and SPECmail2008, as well as record-breaking results on SPECfp2006, ABAQUS and Fluent application benchmarks for High Performance Computing (HPC) environments.
In a blog by BM Seer, which is depicted as "unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee," a test was an reported on the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 4-Chip Server and the benchmarks for the performance of each individual system was graphed and explained, while experimenting with the SPEC OMPL2001 Benchmark Suite. The contents of this lead are the results of that anonymous test.
Allan Packer has posted a detail review of the various Sun blogs that cover various aspects of the new Sun server, the SPARC Enterprise T5440. He has group his reviews into sections:
The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server and technology
I/O Performance
Network Performance
Virtualization
Solaris features
Application Performance
Database Performance
World Record Benchmarks
Sizing
Quite an impressive server and quite an impressive collection of blog entries with great depth.
(Thanks again to Allan for gathering and reviewing those blogs.)
Martin MC Brown's blog in ComputerWorld muses about how shopping for computers has changed over the years, leading to the current emphasis on such considerations as consolidation, virtualization and managing real estate and utilities costs. He finds a winner in the Sun Fire X4150 Server.
Ben Rockwood, Director of Systems at Joyent, blogs on two of the hottest current topics in the storage industry: de-duplication and solid state disk (SSD) storage.
Now available, the Sun StorageTek 8Gb FC PCIe HBA is an 8Gb FC HBA that provides single and dual-port 8Gb FC connectivity in a PCIe low profile form factor HBA for the Sun servers. The Sun StorageTek 8Gb FC PCIe HBA supports Solaris 10 for x64/x86, Windows, RedHat Linux, SUSE Linux, and VMware operating system environments. Multi-pathing IO capability is supported for these OS environments.
With the help of BigAdmin we've made available an article whose purpose is to share links to a flurry of things relevant to storage technology. The Table of contents is as follows:
Storage Articles on BigAdmin
Other Storage Resources
Sun Open Storage Videos
Videos and Postcasts From Sun Storage Platform Software Group
Many users have chosen either RAID 5 or RAID 1+0 for their data storage needs. While both of these RAID algorithms provide increased data availability, they are not without their disadvantages:
RAID 5 - only able to sustain a single drive failure.
RAID 1+0 - 50% of the available storage capacity is used for mirroring
These disadvantages are exacerbated as disk drive capacity increases. With larger disks, the RAID 1+0 implementation becomes increasingly costly. A blueprint by Said A. Syed describes using Raid 6 on the Sun StorageTek 6140 Array and concludes,
"RAID 6 provides protection against two consecutive drive failures by using two independent parity calculations. Sun Microsystems takes advantage of the better performing P+Q algorithm implementation of RAID 6 and uses dedicated processors for RAID computations on intelligent RAID controllers in the StorageTek 6140 arrays for improved performance.
RAID 6 offers highly available storage for applications and implementations requiring extremely high fault tolerance while keeping cost down and performance at an acceptable level during normal circumstances. If best practices are followed, a RAID 6 disk group is capable of performing at rates very close to RAID 5 with a slightly higher cost. RAID 6 is also capable of providing reliability close to RAID 1+0 at a fraction of the cost. "
Jason Ehrhart and Dean Halbeisen's Sun BluePrints On-Line paper entitled, "Sun's Reference Architecture for Next-Generation Data Backup" describes the Sun reference architecture for next-generation data backup using Symantec NetBackup software.
The Department of Defense may be at a turning point in its attitude toward open source solutions, Bill Vass, Sun Microsystems Federal COO, suggests. He cites a yet-to-be released memo being drafted in the office of the Pentagon's CIO that is scheduled to be issued in early November. Joab Jackson's article "Pentagon: Open Source Good to Go" discusses the memo and its background.
With almost as many flavors as that famous California ice cream brand, Ruby and its variants receive a helpful introduction in the article by Janice J. Heiss that she entitles "NetBeans, Solaris, GlassFish: The Ruby's Red Slippers Fit." Heiss writes that, "Although Ruby is sometimes described as a scripting language, its supporters characterize it as a general-purpose computer language with broad application." Her article is a useful primer on the subject and provides information that is helpful in understanding the article "Develop Ruby, JRuby, and Rails Applications" from the Ruby Developer Center.
As the title suggests, Rainer Walter and Ryan Pratt's Sun BigAdmin paper "Installation of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 on Sun Fire x4500 Server" describes the installation itself and the steps one must take to obtain usable file systems.
"Installing HA Containers with ZFS Using the Solaris 10 5/08 and Solaris Cluster 3.2 Software" is the title of Luke Williams' BigAdmin paper that, in the author's view, fills in some of the gray areas in the documentation Sun provides for the same purpose.
Sun has updated the Solaris 10 Binary Application Guarantee Program to include virtualized platforms, in addition to Solaris native host operating system environments. What does this mean for developers who build using a virtualized Solaris OS?
The Sun white paper "Rick, Reach, and Return: Everything Today's CISO Needs to Know About using SSO to Succeed in the Web 2.0 Era" delivers on the promise of its title.
Sun OpenSSO Enterprise
A Single Solution for Web Access Management, Federation, and Web Services Security
Throughout the years, multiple solutions have been required to address the challenge of balancing risk and reach, with a different application for Web access management, federation, and for Web services security. However, as the network environment continues to grow larger and more complex, this approach is becoming increasingly difficult, costly and, ultimately, unsustainable. Sun's Open SSO is geared towards clearing up this problem area.
Sun has prepared a handy four-page pdf datasheet that asks the question, "Are Your Telco Solutions Taking You in the Right Direction?" The pdf introduces the Sun Netra carrier-grade solutions that are able to point the way.
The datasheet introduces Sun's Netra rackmount servers, which it describes as "ideal for the lowest cost of first-subscriber-sensitive applications," as well as the Sun ATCA servers, built for "highest performance density, availability and network throughput -- ideal for scaling applications."
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