Web Processing Performance Sun Modular Datacenter (Sun MD) S20

Thursday Jan 31, 2008

The Sun Modular Datacenter S20 configured with Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 servers demonstrated superior performance/watt and performance/space compared to Dell servers using Xeon quad-core processors.

The Sun Modular Datacenter S20 fully configured with the 102 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, each with a single UltraSPARC T2, can deliver nearly 455,000 web processing operations/second.

• The Sun Modular Datacenter S20 fully configured with the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 systems only requires 160 square feet of space. By comparison, a configuration of Dell servers with 2.66GHz Xeon 5355 in 160 square feet of traditional datacenter space constrained to 150 Watts/square foot would achieve only about 57,500 web processing operations/second. To achieve the same level of performance with the Dell configuration in a traditional datacenter, over 1250 square feet would be needed.
• The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120s configured in a Sun Modular Datacenter S20 are very efficient in terms of space-performance. A Sun Modular Datacenter S20 fully-configured with Dell servers with 2.66GHz Xeon 5355 would only be able to provide about 1/3 of the web processing performance of a Sun Modular Datacenter fully-configured with Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 servers with UltraSPARC T2.
• A Sun Modular Datacenter S20 provides 2840 web-processing-ops/sec/sq-ft vs. a traditional datacenter of Dell servers which provides only 365 web processing-ops/sec/sq-ft.
• The Sun Modular Datacenter S20 is very efficient at cooling. Using the same Sun hardware, the Sun Modular Datacenter S20 is 40% more efficient. This translates into a savings of 1459 metric tons over 5 years.

Due to Sun Modular Datacenter's integrated, high-efficiency power and cooling of up to 25kW per rack, servers, disks and switches can be racked more densely than a traditional datacenter.

Many traditional datacenters are constrained to 150 Watts/square foot, this was used in the above estimates.

BM Seeer: I'll be adding more of the background numbers and calculations when I can find a public version of them, if you are a customer contact Sun and I'm sure you can get versions before I can post them.

Benchmark Description

Web processing performance is based on internal analysis of web processing workloads. The workloads simulates multiple user web sessions accessing a web server via static and dynamic HTTP (contains both HTTP and HTTPS transactions) and is reported as web operations per second.

System Configuration & Results

Results		455,000 web ops/sec
Reference Date:		January 29, 2008
System:		1 x Sun Modular Datcenter S20
Servers:		102 x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120
Total Number Processors:		102 chips / 816 cores (8 threads/core)
Processor/GHz Server:		Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.4 GHz, 64GB
Operating System:		Solaris 10
Software:		Sun JSWS 7.0 Update 2

Storage & Network

• 6 x Sun StorageTek 3510 (Dual-raid controller)
• 51 x Sun StorageTek 3510 (JBOD)
• 9 x Brocade Silkworm 4100 switches
• 5 x Cisco Catalyst 6509 NEBs Switches

Like this post? | | | |

Posted at 06:16AM Jan 31, 2008 in Benchmarks
Tags: blackbox md sun