System News for Sun Users

SPARC T5-4 Produces World Record Single Server TPC-H @3000GB Benchmark Result

2013-06-15T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle's SPARC T5-4 server delivered world record single server performance of 409,721 QphH@3000GB with price/performance of $3.94/QphH@3000GB on the TPC-H @3000GB benchmark. This result shows that the 4-chip SPARC T5-4 server is significantly faster than the 8-chip server results from IBM (POWER7 based) and HP (Intel x86 based).

This result demonstrates a complete data warehouse solution that shows the performance both of individual and concurrent query processing streams, faster loading, and refresh of the data during business operations. The SPARC T5-4 server delivers superior performance and cost efficiency when compared to the IBM POWER7 result...

SPARC T5-8 Delivers Best Single System SPECjEnterprise2010 Benchmark running WebLogic 12c

2013-06-15T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle produced a world record single-server SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark result of 27,843.57 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS using one of Oracle's SPARC T5-8 servers for both the application and the database tier.

The SPARC T5-8 server ran the Oracle Solaris 11.1 operating system and used Oracle Solaris Zones to consolidate eight Oracle WebLogic application server instances and one database server instance to achieve this result. The IBM system used LPARS and AIX V7.1.

This result demonstrated less than 1 second average response times for all SPECjEnterprise2010 transactions and represents JEE 5.0 transactions generated by 227,500 users.

The application server used Oracle Fusion Middleware components including the Oracle WebLogic 12.1 application server and Java HotSpot() 64-Bit Server VM on Solaris, version 1.7.0_15. The database server was configured with Oracle Database 11g Release 2.

The 8-chip SPARC T5 processor based server is 2.6x faster than the 8-chip IBM POWER7+ processor based server.

Read on for details.

Achieving Unmatched Value and Performance from Oracle's T5 Servers: The Real Story

2013-05-10T16:00:00+01:00

IT organizations are under increasing pressure to deliver new services to grow the business, support new requirements for mobile, social networking and cloud services, as well as provide the business with unique competitive advantage through better IT services. And they are expected to achieve all this with better application performance, availability, and security, and within flat or shrinking IT budgets.

Oracle's new T5 servers redefine the economics of enterprise computing with a whole new line up of midrange and high-end servers designed and integrated to address these IT challenges head-on, and at a fraction of competitor's costs.

Attend this webcast and you will:

Learn Oracle's strategy to accelerate application performance by 2X or greater every 2 years
Learn how Oracle designs and builds HW to run Oracle SW more securely and efficiently, and how the new T5 and M5 servers deliver unmatched performance and value
Understand the details of Oracle's 17 world record benchmarks for T5, and how this directly benefits Oracle HW customers
Understand how Oracle's T5 servers consistently and decisively deliver better performance and value than IBM systems that sell for much higher prices

Learn how Oracle designs and builds Hardware to run Enterprise Software faster, and how Oracle's new SPARC servers deliver industry leading price performance while simplifying IT.

Siebel 8.1.1.4 Benchmark on SPARC T5

2013-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle SPARC T5 servers have set have new Siebel 8.1.1.4 benchmark results executed on a mix of SPARC T5-2, SPARC T4-2 and SPARC T4-1 servers, simulating the actions of a large corporation with 40,000 concurrent active users, Giri Mandalika posts. Throughput on the Financial Services Call Center mode was 273,786 transactions/hour for 28,000 users; for Order Management, it was 59,553 transactions/hour for 12,000 users. Siebel database was hosted on a Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array consisting 80 x 24 GB flash modules (FMODs). Fourteen iPlanet Web Server virtual servers were configured with Siebel Web Server Extension (SWSE) plug-in to handle 40,000 concurrent user load.

SPARC T5-2 Achieves JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Benchmark World Records

2013-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle's SPARC T5-2 two-chip server running Oracle Solaris Containers and consolidating JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle WebLogic servers and the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 produced World Record batch throughput for single system results on Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Day-in-the-Life benchmark. The SPARC T5-2 delivered 12,000 online users at 180 msec average response time while concurrently executing a mix of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne long and short batch processes at 198.5 UBEs/min (Universal Batch Engines per minute). The SPARC T5-2 delivered throughput of 880 UBEs/min while executing the batch-only workload performance throughput 2.7x faster per chip than the IBM Power 770 four-chip server.

SPARC T5 Systems Deliver SPEC CPU2006 Rate Benchmark Multiple World Records

2013-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle's SPARC T5 8-processor based systems, running Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3 software, delivered record performance on the SPEC CPU2006 rate benchmarks, beating the 8 processor IBM Power 760 with POWER7+ processors, the 8 processor IBM Power 780 with POWER7 processors and the 8 processor HP DL980 G7 with Intel Xeon E7-4870 processors. The SPARC T5-1B server module delivered record SPEC CPU2006 rate benchmark results for systems with one processor, beating the 1 processor IBM Power 710 Express with a POWER7 processor and the 1 processor NEC Express5800/R120d-1M with an Intel Xeon E5-2690 processor and the 1 processor Supermicro A+ 1012G-MTF.

SPARC T5-2 Posts Yet Another Leading Benchmark Result

2013-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

Among its many recent record breaking benchmark results, Oracle's SPARC T5-2 Server line now numbers world-leading performance on Siebel CRM. SPARC T5-2 servers running the application tier achieved 40,000 users with sub-second response time and with throughput of 333,339 business transactions per hour on the Siebel PSPP benchmark (including Siebel Call Center and Order Management System), delivering 2X better performance on a per chip basis compared to earlier published SPARC T4 numbers. In this benchmarking exercise the SPARC T5-2 server used Oracle Solaris Zones which provide flexible, scalable and manageable virtualization to scale the application within and across multiple nodes.

SPARC T5-8 Server Delivers World Record TPC-C Single System Performance Results

2013-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle's SPARC T5-8 server equipped with eight 3.6 GHz SPARC T5 processors achieved a world record result of 8,552,523 tpmC for a single system on the TPC-C benchmark, demonstrating this world record database performance running Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition with Oracle Partitioning. This result shows that the SPARC T5-8 server is 2.4 times faster per chip compared to IBM Power 780 three-node cluster results for TPC-C tpmC and is 2.5 times less expensive per $/tpmC. The SPARC T5-8 server delivers 1.4 times better performance than the 32-processor IBM Power 595, at one-fifth the price/performance. This configuration will be available 09/25/13.

SPARC T5-1B Server Module Outperformance SPARC T4 Processor-based Server

2013-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle's SPARC T5-1B server module has delivered outstanding results running Oracle Solaris 11 with Oracle Database 11g Release 2, Oracle WebLogic Server 11g and Oracle Communications ASAP version 7.2. The SPARC T5-1B server module achieved 1,722 ASDLs (atomic network activation actions) per second. With both the application and database tiers consolidated onto a single machine, the SPARC T5-1B server module easily supported service activation volumes of 1,722 ASDLs/sec. Oracle Communications ASAP v7.2 delivered 48% higher throughput on a the SPARC T5-1B server module compared to the SPARC T4-2 server, while the SPARC T5 processor delivered over twice the throughput of the SPARC T4 processor.

SPARC T5-2 Performance Running Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA

2013-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle's SPARC T5-2 server running Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA Suite 11g on Oracle Solaris 11 demonstrated an impressive 2.1x to 2.4x throughput improvement with 2x concurrency over a similarly configured SPARC T4-2 server for Fusion Order Demo and Oracle Service Bus (OSB) benchmark workloads using 5 KB message size. Oracle Fusion Middleware SOA was deployed on virtualized environments using Oracle VM for SPARC to demonstrate consolidation of multiple SOA services onto a single system. The benchmark demonstrates SPARC hardware crypto performance within an OSB service using 100-byte element encrypted with AES and signed with RSA128.

SPARC T5-2 Scores Oracle FLEXCUBE Universal Banking Benchmark World Record Performance

2013-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

A SPARC T5-2 server running Oracle FLEXCUBE Universal Banking Release 12 and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) Database 11g Release 2 processed 25 million accounts in 150 minutes for the End of Month workloads with an average utilization of 55% and 196 minutes utilizing 20 cores with an average cpu utilization of 85%. In 56 minutes this configuration processed 25 million accounts for the End of Day workload utilizing just 20 cores and, further, achieved twice the throughput compared to a SPARC T4-4 server. The configuration processed 10.14 million accounts in 28 minutes with an average cpu utilization of 72% on a single server.

SPARC T5-8 Delivers Oracle OLAP Perf Version 3 World Record

2013-04-22T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle's SPARC T5-8 server delivered world record query performance with near real-time analytic capability using the Oracle OLAP Perf Version 3 workload running Oracle Database 11g Release 2 on Oracle Solaris 11. Maximum query throughput on the SPARC T5-8 server is 1.6x higher than the 8-chip Intel Xeon E7-8870 server. The SPARC T5-8 server is clearly able to support at least 600 concurrent users querying OLAP cubes, processing 2.93 million analytic queries/hour with an average response time of 0.66 seconds/query. With a 60 second think time between query requests, the SPARC T5-8 server can support approximately 49,450 concurrent users.

Joerg Moellenkamp on Performance Analysis

2013-03-23T16:00:00+01:00

Readers with the time (and the interest) might wish to have a go at Joerg Moellenkamp's treatise on performance analysis, which parses the "methodology" of that task in a more semantic than methods-oriented fashion. He begins by taking exception to Brendan Gregg's post "The USE method addresses shortcomings in other commonly used methodologies," exception that bears more on philology than performance analysis. There is no disputing Moellenkamp's advice in the end, however: The more you know, the better you will be at performance analysis.

'Performance Tuning for Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g'

2013-03-22T16:00:00+01:00

"Performance Tuning for Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g (BPM)" an Oracle white paper, should be read in conjunction with both the product documentation and Oracle Fusion Middleware Performance and Tuning Guide. The white paper itself presents a set of "best practices" collected from real world experiences with some of the largest and most critical BPM implementations worldwide. There is no globally relevant set of performance tuning recommendations for BPM because the applications built to run on top of BPM vary widely. These recommendations must therefore be tested against each of them to determine which ones are appropriate in a given environment.

Oracle Produces World Record SPECjbb2013 Result with Oracle Solaris and Oracle JDK

2013-03-08T17:00:00+01:00

Oracle Solaris and Oracle JDK delivered a world record result on the SPECjbb2013 benchmark (Composite metric), a benchmark designed to showcase Java server performance, Brian posts. SPECjbb2013 is the replacement for SPECjbb2005. The major findings of this benchmark are:

Oracle Solaris is 1.8x faster on the SPECjbb2013-Composite max-jOPS metric than the Red Hat Enterprise Linux result.
Oracle Solaris is 2.2x faster on the SPECjbb2013-Composite critical-jOPS metric than the Red Hat Enterprise Linux result.
The combination of Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle JDK 7 update 15 delivered a result of 37,007 SPECjbb2013-Composite max-jOPS and 13,812 SPECjbb2013-Composite critical-jOPS on the SPECjbb2013 benchmark.

More details are available.

Examining Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 Secure Copy Performance for High Latency Networks

2013-02-15T17:00:00+01:00

With Oracle Solaris 10 1/13, the performance of secure copy or scp is significantly improved for high latency networks Brian posts. Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 enabling a TCP receive window size up to 1 MB has up to 8 times faster transfer times over the latency range 50 - 200 msec compared to the previous Oracle Solaris 10 8/11, he writes, adding that the default TCP receive window size of 48 KB delivered similar performance in both Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 and Oracle Solaris 10 8/11. Settings above 1 MB for the TCP receive window size delivered similar performance to the 1 MB results.

Oracle VM for SPARC: Best Practices - Top Ten Tuning Tips

2013-02-14T17:00:00+01:00

While there are relatively few "tuning knobs" to adjust with Oracle VM Server for SPARC, there are nevertheless several best practices that can enhance or ensure performance. Jeff Savit's post includes 10 of these, along with several cautions about the use of best practices themselves. He advises users to be aware that best practices do not apply in every situation and that they undergo changes as technology changes. Also, once service level objectives have been met, it's best to quit tuning and move on to something else. Finally, the application of any best practice calls for a healthy measure of judgment.

Siebel 8.1.1.4 Benchmark on SPARC T4

2013-02-06T17:00:00+01:00

A recent Siebel 8.1.1.4 benchmark on SPARC T4 as reported by Giri Mandalika ran Siebel application server instances on three SPARC T4-2/Solaris 10 8/11 systems with the Oracle database server 11gR2 configured on a single SPARC T4-1/Solaris 11 11/11 system. Several iPlanet web server 7 U9 instances with the Siebel Web Plug-in (SWE) installed ran on one SPARC T4-1/Solaris 10 8/11 system. Siebel database was hosted on a single Sun Storage F5100 flash array. Load balancing ensured near uniform load across all web and application server instances. All three Siebel application server systems consumed ~78% CPU on average with sub-second response times for the Siebel modules tested.

SPARC T4-4 Delivers New World Record Performance

2012-11-09T17:00:00+01:00

Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server server with 4 x SPARC T4 processors, 3.0 GHz, and 1 TB memory delivered world record performance with subsecond response time on the Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 benchmark using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 with Oracle OLAP option running on Oracle Solaris 11. Data storage employed 1 x Sun Fire X4275 (using COMSTAR) and 2 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (each with 80 FMODs). Redo storage used 1 x Sun Fire X4275. The SPARC T4-4 server achieved throughput of 430,000 cube-queries/hour with an average response time of 0.85 seconds and the median response time of 0.43 seconds.

DevOps for Developers

2012-11-02T16:00:00+01:00

A New Way of Thinking Possibilities for Collaboration Between Two Competing Realms

"DevOps for Developers" by Java Champion Michael Hutterman is a book that Tori Wieldt describes as bridging " ... the gap between development and operations by aligning incentives and sharing approaches for processes and tools ... broaden[ing] the usage of Agile practices to operations to foster collaboration and streamline the entire software delivery process in a holistic way." Hutterman bolsters his argument with real-world use cases, giving the readers the tools required to reform development and operations processes.

SPARC T4 Servers Set World Record Mark for Siebel PSPP Benchmark

2012-10-18T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle's Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Industry Applications Release 8.1.1.4 and Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running Oracle Solaris on three SPARC T4-2 and two SPARC T4-1 servers achieved world record results for Oracle's Siebel Platform Sizing and Performance Program (PSPP) benchmark suite. According to Oracle's report, the SPARC T4 servers running the Siebel PSPP 8.1.1.4 workload, which includes Siebel Call Center and Order Management System, demonstrate impressive throughput performance (29,000 users; 239,748 transactions with 0.165 second call center response time and 0.925 second order management response time) of the SPARC T4 processor.

World Record Oracle E-Business Consolidated Workload on SPARC T4-2, T4-4

2012-10-18T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle reported the world record performance of Oracle E-Business Suite Standard Medium multiple-online module benchmark using Oracle's SPARC T4-2 and SPARC T4-4 servers, which ran the application and database. The results demonstrate that a multi-tier configuration of SPARC T4 servers running the Oracle E-Business Suite R12.1.2 application and Oracle Database 11g Release 2 is capable of supporting 4,100 online users with 2.08 second response-times, executing a mix of complex transactions consolidating four Oracle E-Business modules. Oracle reports that the SPARC T4-2 in the application tier utilized about 65% capacity and the SPARC T4-4 in the database tier about 30%, providing significant scalability headroom.

Combined Oracle Business Intelligence EE 11g, SPARC T4-4 Performance Proves Scalability Potential

2012-10-18T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle reports that a SPARC T4-4 server with internal Solid State Drive (SSD) using the ZFS file system running Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g achieved 25,000 concurrent users with an average response time of 0.36 seconds with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g 11.1.1.6.0 server cache set to ON. This performance clearly shows that the underlying hardware, SPARC T4 server, and the Oracle BI EE 11g (11.1.1.6.0 64-bit) platform deployed in a vertical scale-out fashion scale within a single system while executing 415 transactions/sec. Oracle Internet Directory provided authentication for the 25,000 Oracle BI EE users with sub-second response time.

SPARC T4-4 Delivers World Record First Result on PeopleSoft Combined Benchmark

2012-10-05T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle announces that its SPARC T4-4 servers running Oracle's PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 combined online and batch benchmark achieved World Record 18,000 concurrent users while executing a PeopleSoft Payroll batch job of 500,000 employees in 43.32 minutes and maintaining online users response time at < 2 seconds. This benchmark result is the first to involve the concurrent running of online and batch workloads. This record was set with a SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Solaris Zones, another running PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 application server and a SPARC T4-2 server running Oracle WebLogic Server in the web tier.

SPARC T4-2 Server Sets World Record on PeopleSoft Enterprise Financials Benchmark

2012-10-01T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle's SPARC T4-2 server achieved World Record performance on Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Financials 9.1, executing 20 Million General Ledger Journals lines and posting batch jobs in 8.92 minutes on Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running on Oracle Solaris 11, delivering more than 146 megabytes (MB)/sec of IO throughput. Oracle claims that this benchmark demonstrates that the SPARC T4-2 server with PeopleSoft Financials 9.1 can easily process 100 million journal lines in less than 1 hour.

Oracle Achieves Record TPC-C Benchmark Result on 2 Processor System

2012-09-29T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle Database 11g Standard Edition One and Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2, running on a Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server with two Intel Xeon E5-2690 2.9 GHz processors achieved 1.6 Million transactions per minute (tpmC) with a price/performance of $0.47/tpmC. This result demonstrated 34 percent more performance at 32 percent less cost per transaction than IBM DB2 on a 2 processor POWER7-based system. In addition, this record breaking result outperformed IBM DB2 on a similar Flex System configuration utilizing the same number of identical Intel processors and the same amount of memory capacity.

Oracle's SPARC T4-2 Produces World Record Oracle Essbase Aggregate Storage Benchmark

2012-08-31T16:00:00+01:00

Oracle's SPARC T4-2 Server (2 cpus), configured with a Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array and running Oracle Solaris 10 with Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Essbase 11.1.2.2.100, outperformed Oracle's SPARC Enterprise M5000 server (4 cpus) with Oracle Essbase 11.1.1.3 on Oracle Solaris 10 by 80%, 32% and 2x performance improvement on Data Loading, Default Aggregation and Usage Based Aggregation, respectively. The SPARC T4-2 server achieved sub-second query response times for 20,000 users in a 15 dimension database and aggregated and stored values for a 15 dimension cube in 398 minutes with 16 threads and in 484 minutes with 8 threads.

Introducing Regular Expressions

2012-07-24T16:00:00+01:00

"Introducing Regular Expressions: Unraveling Regular Expressions, Step-by-step" is a new title from O'Reilly by Michael Fitzgerald that walks readers, step-by-step, with the help of numerous examples, to demonstrate how to match, extract, and transform text by matching specific words, characters, and patterns. Regular expressions, O'Reilly's blurb explains, are an essential part of a programmer�'s toolkit, available in various Unix utilities as well as programming languages such as Perl, Java, JavaScript, and C#. Fitzgerald's book will familiarize readers with the most commonly used syntax in regular expressions, providing an understanding of how using them will save considerable time.

Oracle ZFSSA Smashes IBM XIV Running Oracle ERP On Oracle RAC DB

2012-07-18T16:00:00+01:00

In a proof of concept exercise running a customer's Oracle ERP on Oracle T-4 servers and an Oracle RAC on T-4's, plus storage using an Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance 7420, Darius Zanganeh reports that, even without any optimization, the Oracle system was 2.5x faster than the customer's IBM XIV production system in running their month end close. Zanganeh suggests the reason is the size of available CACHE: 1TB of cache split on 2 controllers, 2 TB of L2arc Read SSDs and a few write SSDs. Furthermore, the Oracle configuration only used about 25% of the total hardware setup.

What is DevOps? Infrastructure as code

2012-06-11T16:00:00+01:00

O'Reilly has released "What is DevOps? Infrastructure as Code" by Mike Loukides, VP of Content Strategy, who writes that IT specialists are becoming part of the development team, writing the code that maintains infrastructure in multi-server environments. Even applications that run in the cloud have to be resilient and fault tolerant, O'Reilly's release note contends, creating the need to be monitored and the capability to adjust to huge swings in load. Loukides describes this expanded role for sys admins.