c0t0d0s0.org

Diese Präsentation muss ich mir unbedingt besorgen. Der Vortrag hat wirklich umfassend beschrieben, wie man mit der SSL-Beschleunigung der UltraSPARC T1 CPUs umgeht. Ich werd einfach mal fragen, ob ich den Inhalt ins Deutsche uebersetzen und in mein Wiki setzen darf. So ... nun gehts weiter in einen Vortrag ueber ZFS

After we open-sourced the design of the UltraSPARC T1, i´ve predicted here in my blog and at customer presentation, that we will see stripped-down version of the the T1 sonner or later for the embedded market. And the "sooner or later" is right now. The processor is called S1 and can be obtained unter GPL at Simply Risc. It´s a slightly extended single-core version of the T1.

Realworldtech offers an analysis about Niagara II in Return of the hydra:

This could put Niagara II at performance parity with the competition, and a lead in performance/watt. Either way, it is encouraging to see that Sun will continue to invest in novel architectures.

You can download the presentation about the Niagara II. You will find it here. Apropos presentation: Yesterday i´ve heard an internal presentation about an upcoming product, that made me almost speechless in some parts. No i won´t tell you which product, but it will be really really cool.
(via Systemhelden)

I looked for a project into the SPEC website today and saw that the T2000 still leads the SPECweb2005 benchmark by roughly 4000 points. And this benchmark was made on the T2000 in November last year. Even the new Woodcrests stopped short of 10000 points and that were already fully blown 4 core systems (maximum for Woodcrest right now). Now keep in consideration that Niagara II already runs in our labs. Interesting times . Well ... Rolf, we should do the power meter gag again next cebit

ZDnet reports in Sun boots server with Niagara II chip:

The Niagara II system booted on May 26, spokesman Alex Plant said, about three months ahead of the late August or early September schedule

and

In addition, Niagara II has built-in 10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet networking, multiple floating-point units to speed mathematical calculations, and new encryption and decryption abilities.

Normally i don´t quote our own press releases, but this one is really interesting: Sun Fire T1000 Server With CoolThreads(TM) Technology Outperforms All Competing 1U Systems on the Market

Here is another T2000 review. This one has mysql as the focus:

Man our T2000 rocks out for MySQL serving. It requires a bit of tuning to get going, but it our scales our existing Opteron clusters 4-20 to 1.

news.com reports about Colms Benchmarks on the T2000. Most interesting comment from Colm cited in the article:

The Niagara servers only consumed about 220 watts while the Itanium sucked up 400 watts. "We were kind of surprised about the power consumption" on the T2000, he said. "I thought maybe my power meter wasn't working."

When you don´t believe you us or a vendor-supplied tool, when we talk about the need of energy efficent servers, talk with your HVAC guy.

When talking with the HVAC guy before he left he said something interesting. "Don't buy Dell." He's not a server guy, he's not in IT, he's an HVAC guy. "They run hot as hell," he noted.

Colm made an additional benchmark. The T2000 seems to be faster on Linux than on Solaris, but I assume that he hadn´t switched on the write cache of the discs. This can make quite a difference. On Linux the write caches are activated by default.

AMD, EPA and Sun are working together to define a metric to compare the energy efficency for servers. Perhaps this will end the brute-force-tactics (mooooooore frequency, moooooore) in server design and benchmarketing with unrealistic configuration (more than thousand disks for a good TPC-C-Benchmark will ruin your energy efficiency benchmark ).
Perhaps Sun rides with the UltraSPARC T1 on the first wave of an idea, whose time has come.

IT Jungle reports about Niagara and Niagara 2 and makes an interesting point:

Moving workloads does not necessarily mean companies want to take their operating system with them, and a lot of shops that have dumped Solaris for Linux might be fairly easy to convince to dump Linux for Solaris--if the price, thermals, and support are right.

A company which made the homework at the last migration should have no problem to migrate back to Solaris. So : You have no argument for the further usage of Linux

Finally, there is an german blog about a T2000 -Try&Buy

There seems to be a little missunderstandig in the marketplace. T2000 is the best Application- and Webserver. End of Story. Really ? Well, not really. We've made some interesting benchmarks based on the iGen OLTP Benchmark that perpetuates the story of T2000. For the people unaware of iGen OLTP-Benchmark :

The iGEN-OLTP 1.5 benchmark is a SUN internally developed transaction processing database workload. This workload simulates a light-weight Global Order System that stresses lock management and connectivity. This benchmark is easily portable on any database that support the ANSI v2 standard.
The database has 1.25 million customers residing in it, and is approximately 6 GB in size. The transactions are comprised of various SQL transactions: read-only selects, joins and insert operations.
The transaction mix for iGen in this test are 39% heavy-weight, 43% medium-weight, and 17% light-weight queries).

Three machines were compared in this benchmark:

Sun Fire T2000 (8 cores, 1 chip, 1.2 GHz US T1) Solaris 10, Oracle 10gR2
Dell 6850 (4 cores, 4 chips, 3.12GHz Xeon EM64T) SuSE9, Oracle 10gR2
Dell 6650 (4 cores, 4 chips, 3.0GHz Xeon MP) RH4,Oracle 10gR2

The Dell systems are reasonable choices for a database Servers: Same storage. Same amount of memory on all systems.
The result:

Sun Fire T2000 - peak users 5750, 162,080 tpmM
Dell 6850 peak users 1300, 44,490 tpmM
Dell 6650 peak users 2450, 60,730 tpmM

Wow ... okay....

• The Sun Fire T2000 server beats the 4-way Dell PowerEdge 6850/Linux and 4-way Dell PowerEdge 6650/Linux configurations in head-to-head on Oracle OLTP database performance.
• The Sun Fire T2000 server is 3.7x faster than a Dell PowerEdge 6850 with four 3.12GHz Xeon EM64T processors.
• The Sun Fire T2000 server is 2.7x faster than the Dell PowerEdge 6650 with four 3GHz Xeon 32-bit processors with 3 MB L3 cache.
• The Sun Fire T2000 server is able to operate efficiently at very high loads and is very stable showing over 6,000 user connections using Oracle 10gR2. In contrast, the Dell Systems could only support 2,500 user connections and exhibited instability.
• Not only is the Dell PowerEdge 6850 3.7x slower than the Sun Fire T2000 it also requires 1.6x more power at 510 watts. (Dell PowerEdge 6850 has four 3.12 GHz Xeon EM64T).

To this one i want to add my personal experience:

•The Oracle/Linux solution is often costly and complex to setup and maintain due to hidden or unclear compatibility and version dependencies.

Imagine you have an Quad-Opteron rig from Sun, a big storage array from a well known manufacturer and Oracle. Oracle supports certain distributions with certain linux kernels, the opteron rig supports certain distributions with certain linux kernels and the multipathing drivers for the storage array supports certain distributions with certain linuxkernels. Only one thing is missing ... the intersection. And now tell me that it's easy to run professional computing on linux. This stuff can drive you crazy. And "okay, it's not supported, but it will run" doesn't count ... not for central systems in an enterprise.