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Web2.0 Consolidation Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120

Wednesday Nov 05, 2008

This is another interesting consolidation test. This one used zones/containers. The previous posting was "native consolidation" that just used Solaris for consolidation without any additional features. How you consolidate and what your requirements are will of course change what consolidation software you use.

Before the commenters who love competitive technologies post, clearly this test was done by Sun to show the value of upgrading.

Web2.0 data centers are filled with racks of x86 servers. Data center architects simply put a single app on a single box, but this can be difficult to manage and inefficient in terms of utilization, power, and space. There is a very easy way however to consolidate many web servers onto a single CMT server.

With the introduction of the UltraSPARC T2+ processor, the compute density has once again been massively increased and is a natural platform for consolidation. UltraSPARC CMT servers can use LDOMs, zones and resources groups to further the managability of compute resources in order to provide fantastic benefits in power, space, and performance. Sun can consolidate ten 2-socket x64 systems into a single 1RU CMT server. Sun also produces a 7.8x better power performance results with this consolidation benchmark.

Reduce the overall cost and footprint using Sun UltraSPARC CMT servers with an optimized web2.0 software stack.

Proves CMT architecture can scale up and out better than traditional x86 based machines.

Sun's optimized Coolstack 1.3.1 scales to meet the needs of web2.0 workloads.

Virtulization with Solaris Zones allows for easy replication of the web2.0 stack.

Consolidation of previous generation gear can easily be mapped to Solaris Zones. IP addresses stay the same, server names, etc..

Ten times or greater reduction in footprint when upgrading the data center from traditional x86 architectures.

3,200 users per UltraSPARC T2 socket, and 400 users supported per Zone.

Results Summary

For each UltraSPARC T2 socket, ten older x86 servers can be eliminated. Additionally, by increasing average utilization and expending less watts/user this vastly improves compute density and creating a huge savings in floor space and power.

System	Processors		Results
System	Ch, Cr, Thr	GHz Type	users	Util%	RU	watts / user	users / RU
Sun Fire T5120	1, 8, 64	1.4 UltraSPARC T2	3,200	95	1	0.15	3,200
Sun Fire T5120	1, 8, 64	1.4 UltraSPARC T2	2,400	60	1	0.20	2,400
Sun Fire v20z	2, 2, 2	2.2 AMD 248	300	40	1	1.163	300
4 x Sun Fire x4200 (Distributed)	16, 16, 16	2.2 AMD 248	1,900	xx	8	0.73	238

Consolidation process

For easy mapping from the old environment to the new, we created one zone for each "core" on the UltraSPARC T2. For the 2,400 user run, we had 300 users per zone simulating the consolidation of 8 x v20z servers. We chose 8 zones so that each zone could be mapped to a core. For UltraSPARC T2+ based servers, more zones could easily be added to take advantage of the throughput of this server.

This flexible environment can be scaled up or down based on the needs of the applications running in the zone. For this test, we created one full "LAMP" stack on each of the 8 local Solaris zones. Next, each zone was scaled from 100 to 400 users running the Olio web2.0 benchmark. The T5120 server was able to support a total of 3,200 users.

Benchmark Description

The application in the web2.0 kit implements a social events calendar with features such as AJAX, tagging, tag cloud, comments, ratings, feeds, mashups, extensive use of data caching, use of both structured and unstructured data and a high data read:write ratio that is typical of applications in this space. The web2.0 benchmark kit has multiple different flavors. For purposes of this evaluation, we decided to use the following components all running on UltraSPARC CMT servers: