BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

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:

Solaris
Apache
memcached
MySQL
PHP

Total Tyranny of low utilization datacenters

Friday Nov 17, 2006

The Total Tyranny of low utilization datacenters

In this blog and other blogs I've commented on, Woodcrest supporters always want to say their servers are better at low utilisation. This is totally the wrong way to go! They first claim typical datacenters are running at low utilisations, example: Xen claims typical datacenters are at 15%. Horrible, HORRIBLE.

So why shouldn't use just add all kinds of techniques to power at lower utilisations, clearly that is the best way to save money? Right? Wrong.

Lets take a simple example of a 400 watt server(@ 100%) that saves 20 watts for each 10% reduction in utilisation. Will show this in a table below and compare equivalent work done compared to 100% so you can see the hyperbolic nature of the curve. Of course I'm only looking at one server so there is some discretisation but when you have a datacenter it will quickly approach these numbers.

%Utilisation 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Watts-at-Util 400 380 360 340 320 300 280 260 240 220 220

watts/work 400 422 450 486 533 600 700 867 1200 2200 inf.

Now that I've got you shocked, let's look at a more typical example. Lets compare 5 servers running at 10% utilisation (that is 220 watts each or 1100 watts for the 5 of them). A single server running at 50% utilisation only uses 300 watts! The 10% case almost require 3.7 times more power! OUCH!

Bottom line: It is far too easy to be fooled to think you are saving money if power-saving features at low utilisation is your answer. By the by, a significant number of Sun's large servers run at over 80% utilisation using Solaris, of course.

Here is an example from 2004 of someone on different products who likely understands this math. As reported in Computerworld:

"Dennis Callahan, CIO at The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America in New York, server utilization has shot up to nearly 50% in the past 18 months, with a goal in coming years of nearly 70%.

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