c0t0d0s0.org

Interesting customer story about the usage of T2000 and X4100 at ebay inc. It´s one of this marketing speak news, nevertheless it points to real world usages of T2000 and databases.

PS: Guiseppe already pointed to it in a comment a few days ago but i didn´t want to hide it in the comments any longer

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."

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

This happens when you use a system for a tailor-made task:

Bottom line, the T2000 was able to handle over 3 times the number of transactions per-second and about 60% more concurrent downloads than the current ftp.heanet.ie machine can (a dual Itanium with 32Gb of memory) running identical software.

The full review is available here.

Wirklich schön, wenn man solche Berichte von Kunden liest : SunFire T2000: Erster Eindruck:

Ich bin immer noch mißtrauisch, daß das im Vergleich zu seinem Vorgänger überraschend hypergeniale Solaris 10 eine Einzelleistung gewesen sein könnte, aber seit heute keimt hier wieder ein kleines Feuerchen der Hoffnung in mir auf, daß auch bei Hardware wieder Meilensteine für IT'ler gesetzt werden könnten. Bisher konnte ich mein Interesse an dieser neuen und noch am ehesten IBMs Cell Processor ähnelnden Architektur nur als "vorsichtige Neugier" bezeichnen, aber seit ein paar Stunden bin ich jetzt richtig angefixt.

James Governor writes about the contact with two T2000 customers in germany. He seems to be more than impressed.

Here are excepts from my notes:
"We ran our benchmarks - it was just amazing. 800 parallel requests into the single machine. 280 requests per second coming up, less than 500 millisecond response time. Mercury couldn’t handle it. We needed more than five sun boxes to hammer it. "
Mercury load generators kept crapping out before the server: that tells you something. Apparently Germans are worried about electricity cost as well, and are excited about replacing five servers with one.

cmpnet Asia published a positive review of the Sun Fire T2000:

Sun's tapped into something smart here, given the high cost to large organizations of keeping data centers cool, as well as the need to maximize existing space without sacrificing performance. These servers could save companies millions

Some comments to the "bad" verdicts: ,The controller will move onto the mainboard very soon (the solder pads are on the board already), there is no linux for this system, but you need a fully threaded operating system, i have serious doubts that linux would run reasonably well on a CMT-System. The problem with nonthreaded application can be circumvented by running multiple copies of the application in seperate containers with dedicated processor sets (where applicable).
PS: No, i don´t think the system will be field upgradable by a soldering iron