SPC-2 Benchmark: Sun Storage 6780 Array best in-class-$/perf

Thursday Feb 12, 2009

The power of the Sun Storage 6780 Array product coupled with our 4Gb HBAs has demonstrated industry class leading SPC-2 benchmarking capabilities: Best-in-class $/performance, Half Price of IBM.

Sun Storage 6780 Array has best-in-class $/performance of $53.61 (RAID5) and $55.25 (RAID6) beating IBM by almost 50%

Sun Storage 6780 Array has best-in-class performance of 4,818.43 (RAID5) and 4,675.50 (RAID6) SPC-2 MBPS.

The Sun Storage 6780 Array has a 1.7X better price/performance advantage over the same performing IBM system.

The Sun Storage 6780 Array delivers the best SPC-2 performance of any dual controller system.

The Sun Storage 6780 Array delivers the same performance as the IBM system, but at nearly half the price.

The Sun Storage 6780 Array delivers the best SPC-2 performance of any sub-$250K system, the best performing systems are over $1.6M in SPC-2 total price and are not even 2X in performance.

SPC-2 Performance Chart (in increasing price-performance order)

System	SPC-2 MBPS	$/SPC-2 MBPS	ASU (GB)	TSC Price	Data Protect- ion Level	Date	Result Id
Sun SS6780	4,818.43	$53.61	16,383.186	$236,790	RAID 5	2/3/09	B00039
IBM DS5300	4,818.43	$93.80	16,383.186	$451,986	RAID 5	9/25/08	B00037
Sun SS6780	4,675.50	$55.25	14,042.731	$236,790	RAID 6	2/3/09	B00040
IBM DS5300	4,675.50	$96.67	14,042.731	$451,986	RAID 6	9/25/08	B00038
Fujitsu E8000	3,480.68	$238.93	4,569.845	$831,649	Mirroring	3/8/07	B00019

SPC-2 MBPS = the Performance Metric
$/SPC-2 MBPS = the Price/Performance Metric
ASU Capacity = the Capacity Metric
Data Protection = Data Protection Metric
TSC Price = Total Cost of Ownership Metric
Results Identifier = A unique identification of the result Metric

Complete SPC-2 benchmark results may be found at http://www.storageperformance.org.

Benchmark Description

The SPC Benchmark-2™ (SPC-2) is a series of related benchmark performance tests that simulate the sequential component of demands placed upon on-line, non-volatile storage in server class computer systems. SPC-2 provides measurements in support of real world environments characterized by:

• Large numbers of concurrent sequential transfers.
• Demanding data rate requirements, including requirements for real time processing.
• Diverse application techniques for sequential processing.
• Substantial storage capacity requirements.
• Data persistence requirements to ensure preservation of data without corruption or loss.

Disclosure Statement:

Sun Storage 6780 Array 4,818.43 SPC-2 MBPS, $/SPC-2 MBPS $53.61, ASU Capacity 16,383.186GB, Protect RAID 5, Cost $258,329.00, Ident. B00039. SPC-2, SPC-2 MBPS, $/SPC-2 MBPS are regular trademarks of Storage Performance Council (SPC). More info www.storageperformance.org

Sun Storage 6780 Array 4,675.50 SPC-2 MBPS, $/SPC-2 MBPS $55.25, ASU Capacity 14,042.731GB, Protect RAID 6, Cost $258,329.00, Ident. B00040. SPC-2, SPC-2 MBPS, $/SPC-2 MBPS are regular trademarks of Storage Performance Council (SPC). More info www.storageperformance.org

Results Summary

Results
	System:		Sun Storage 6780 Array		Sun Storage 6780 Array
	Performance:		4,818.43 SPC-2 MBPS		4,675.50 SPC-2 MBPS
	Price/Performance:		$53.61 $/SPC-2 MBPS		$55.25 $/SPC-2 MBPS
	ASU Capacity:		16,383.186 GB		14,042.731 GB
	Data Protection Level:		RAID 5		RAID 6
	TSC Price:		$258,329.00		$258,329.00
	Results Identifier:		B00039		B00040
	Server:		IBM Ssytem x3850 M2		IBM Ssytem x3850 M2
	Operating System:		Windows Server 2003 SP2		Windows Server 2003 SP2

See Also:

Sun Storage 6780 Array SPC-2 (RAID 5) Executive Summary (6 pages, acrobat pdf)

Complete Sun Storage 6780 Array SPC-2 (RAID 5) Full Disclosure Report (acrobat pdf)

Sun Storage 6780 Array SPC-2 (RAID 6) Executive Summary (6 pages, acrobat pdf)

Complete Sun Storage 6780 Array SPC-2 (RAID 6) Full Disclosure Report (acrobat pdf)

Storage Performance Council (SPC) Home Page

Ideas International Benchmark page

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Posted at 02:22PM Feb 12, 2009 in Benchmark Issues
Tags: ibm performance spc-2 sun

Open letter to TPC & SPEC committees

Tuesday Jan 27, 2009

This blog approaches 250,000 visits, first of all thanks I hope you have all learnt a few things of value from this anonymous Sun employee. It is not about me. But the stats are quite an honour.

I decided to have an open letter to the benchmark committees, here are my blue sky suggestions:

• Can you please have the exact words you need for a disclosure statement clearly listed with any submission.
  ex: SPEC Disclosure Statement:
  Sun SPARC Enterprise X5220 (8 cores, 1 chip) 41847 SPECweb2005. SPEC, SPECweb reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of Dec 4, 2008.
  ex: TPC Disclosure Statement:
  Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 118,573.3 QphH@1000GB, $23.38/QphH@1000GB, avail 09/10/08. TPC-H, QphH, $/QphH tm of Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). More info www.tpc.org.
  That way one could just copy&paste from your form and not try to dig up your rules. When one needed several different results for for comparisons it would only take very simple editing.
• Make all vendors publish exact power as measured on the performance bragged about for all benchmarks. No to make new benchmarks to show watts on current benchmarks. We all must save energy now. Let the public see the data. This table should be filled in: "New Table of published power-performance data"
• Only allow power-performance to be reported on systems with default power-management software. We need power-management on by default for all results. Also only allow standard BIOS (of course tell Sun "no" as well, as I know Sun has published results with the same sorts of modifications). The reason why is we need to move the industry in a way that saves energy without having to turn "on" or "off" features on a per server basis. That is way to much work in a complex datacentre. Standard & default should be the direction.

Note: If you are a TPC or SPEC committee member I would appreciate any comments, these are blue sky ideas. But if you comment you owe it to all of the readers to state your affiliations and vendor name if you get are employed by a computer vendor.

New Table of published power-performance data

Friday Jan 16, 2009

Here us an upated table of power-performance benchmarks, trying to hightlight easy to measure watts on many different standard benchmarks.

I put the number of published benchmarks that show watt-performance for Sun and use "0" zero for those that have ZERO information on the measured watts used during the benchmark. What is behind this stonewall of red? It is really funny that some vendors avoid showing easy-to-measure power on performance benchmarks with real configurations. Is it that they have only have a advantage on special configurations?

Power-Performance Benchmarks

Benchmarks	Sun	IBM	HP	Dell	Unisys
SPECweb/other-web	Yes 6/1	0	0	0	0
SPECjbb	Yes: 5	0	0	0	0
SPECjAppServer	Yes: 5	0	0	0	0
SPECmail	Yes: 2	0	0	0	0
SPEComp	Yes: 2	0	0	0	0
Lotus Domino iNotes	Yes: 3	0	0	0	0
Oracle's Siebel CRM 8.0	Yes: 2	0	0	0	0
VMmark	Yes: 2	0	0	0	0
MySQL	Yes: 1	0	0	0	0
ERP (CDA/NDA needed)	Yes: 3	0	0	0	0
SPECpower	SPECpower Issues	Yes	Yes	Yes	0

Note customers can get "ERP" power data from Sun under CDA/NDA agreement, as some SW vendors do not allow public display of wattage data measured during the benchmark.

Want more details on Sun's published measured watts, last week I posted "Sun's 2008 summary of measured watts & watt/performance": http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/sun_s_2008_summary_of

Some other thoughts for those really interested in saving real energy:

• Power-management software should be on by default or NOT ALLOWED IN BENCHMARKS!
• Increase server utilisation to most effectively reduce power consumed! Servers are very very inefficient at low-utilisation!
• look at watt-performance NOT perf/watt when comparing servers!
• replace incandescents with CFL lights.

Disclosure Statement:

SPEC, SPECweb, SPECjbb, SPECjAppServer, SPEComp, and SPECpower benchmark name are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. VMware(R) VMmark(R) is a product of VMware, an EMC Company. Oracle, Siebel, registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. More info www.oracle.com/apps_benchmark/html/white-papers-siebel.html NotesBench R6iNotes More info: www.notesbench.org

VMware/VMmark Sun Fire X4450 Best 24 Core Result and watts

Wednesday Jan 14, 2009

The Sun Fire X4450 powered by four 6-core Intel Xeon X7460 processors at 2.66 GHz, has achieved a score of 19.47 @14 tiles, supporting 84 fully fledged VM instances (14 Tiles). This result puts the SUN X4450 on the leading front of 4-socket/24 cores Intel-based VMware servers.

This results beats IBM x3850-M2 result to date of 19.10 @ 14 tiles and all the other Intel based submissions in the 24 cores category with similar architecture while using equal or smaller memory footprint (80GB) then the other systems.

The Sun Fire X4450 server, equipped with four 6C Xeon X7460, provides a highly scalable virtualization platform, that, in combination with the VMware ESX Server 3.5.0 hypervisor, takes full advantage of Intel Virtualization Technology.

To support 14 tiles per server , efficient and reliable Sun StorageTek 2540 Fibre Channel arrays with Sun StorageTek 2501 SAS expansion units were used. This family of arrays offers enterprise-class, reliable RAID-protected functionality in a high-density 2 RU package and is well suited for virtualization environments.

The electrical Power consumption measured for the 4-socket 6C 80GB server during the benchmark runs was on average: 933 Watts (Idle 750 Watts).

The electrical Power consumption for the data storage during the benchmark runs for each disk array and workload type was on average:

• 1x STK2540 (database workloads): 304 Watts (Idle 296 Watts)
• 1x STK2540 (Tile workloads except database): 306 Watts (Idle 296 Watts)
• 1x STK2501 (Tile workloads except database): 261 Watts (Idle 253 Watts)

Sun is the first vendor (and only) to disclose actual power consumption measured while running VMmark, the industry's most popular virtualization workload.

VMmark Performance Results for 24 Cores, Benchmark Score (bigger is better)

System	Socket/ Core/ Thrds	GHz Type	GB	ESX ver	Spindle	Mirr	Tiles	Score	Date Pub
Sun Fire X4450	4/24/24	2.66 Xeon X7460	80GB	3.5.0U2	192	n	14	19.47	13-Jan-09
IBM x3850 M2	4/24/24	2.66 Xeon X7460	80GB	3.5.0U2	166	n	14	19.10	17-Sep-08
Dell PE R900	4/24/24	2.66 Xeon X7460	128GB	3.5.0U2	140	n	14	18.96	02-Dec-08
HP PL DL580 G5	4/24/24	2.66 Xeon X7460	96GB	3.5.0U2	168	n	14	18.56	18-Aug-08

Complete benchmark results may be found at the VMware benchmark website http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html.

Benchmark Description

VMmark is the first benchmark that was designed specifically to quantify and measure the performance of virtualized environments. It features a novel tile-based scheme for measuring the scalability of consolidated workloads and provides a consistent methodology that captures both the overall scalability and individual application performance.

The VMmark benchmark is built on VMware's expertise in virtualization performance and incorporates popular workloads from application categories most commonly represented in customer data centers.

The purpose of this benchmark is to measure performance and scalability of a pre-established mix of workloads (a Tile), which allows comparisons among similar configuration platforms.

A Tile consists of 6 fixed workload applications, each running in its own Virtual Machine (VM) (6 VMs per Tile) such as Mail, Java, Web, Database and File Serving plus a standby server which only purpose is to provide a spare Virtual Machine that does not do any work and is not accounted in the score.

VMmark benchmark provides two key performance metrics:

1. The number of tiles supported by a system, which is an indication of how many systems/applications can be consolidated on one platform where the higher the number of tiles supported the higher the number of consolidated systems.
2. The Score, which is an overall measure of the amount of work that is accomplished by all the Tiles in the system and summarizes the level of service of all the workloads during a benchmark run. The score or amount of work is a composition of Actions/minute(Mail server), New Orders/minute(Java server), Access/minute(web server), Commits/minute(Database), MB/second(file server). Thus, among systems with the same number of tiles, the system with the higher score is the system that is capable of producing the greater amount of work.

For detailed description of VMmark, tiles and score definition, please refer to VMmark Features

Disclosure Statement:

VMware(R) VMmark(R) is a product of VMware, an EMC Company. VMmark utilizes SPECjbb2005(TM) and SPECweb2005(TM), which are available from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). Results from http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/ as of January 13, 2009.

Result Information

Certified Results
	Score:		19.47@14-tiles
	Server:		Sun Fire X4450
	Processors:		4-socket 2.66 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon X7460
	Memory:		80 GB
	VMware ESX Server:		3.5.0 Update 2
	VMmark:		1.1
	Storage:		9 x STK2540, 7x STK2501, each storage array using 12x146GB 15K RPM disks

Table of published power-performance data

Tuesday Jan 13, 2009

Last week, Time magazine had an article "America's Untapped Energy Resource: Boosting Efficiency". It was all about how we all need to waste less energy for the same amount of work. That is why Sun is a be proponent of measuring watts on servers on standard benchmarks. Other's try to focus on watts when idle or nearly idle on tiny configurations.

It is really funny that some vendors avoid showing easy to measure power on performance benchmarks at real configurations. Is it that they have a advantage on special configurations and they want to only show that?

I decided to show this graphically, using "0" zero for those that have ZERO information on the measured watts used during the benchmark. What is behind this stonewall of red?

Power-Performance Benchmarks

Benchmarks	Sun	IBM	HP	Dell	Unisys
SPECweb	Yes	0	0	0	0
SPECjbb	Yes	0	0	0	0
SPECjAppServer	Yes	0	0	0	0
SPECmail	Yes	0	0	0	0
SPEComp	Yes	0	0	0	0
Lotus Domino iNotes	Yes	0	0	0	0
Oracle's Siebel CRM 8.0	Yes	0	0	0	0
VMmark	Yes	0	0	0	0
MySQL	Yes	0	0	0	0
ERP	CDA/NDA	0	0	0	0
SPECpower	SPECpower Issues	yes	yes	yes	0

Note customers can get "ERP" power data from Sun under CDA/NDA agreement, as some SW vendors do not allow public display of wattage data measured during the benchmark.

Want more details on Sun's published measured watts, last week I posted "Sun's 2008 summary of measured watts & watt/performance": http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/sun_s_2008_summary_of

Some other thoughts for those really interested in saving real energy:

• Power-management software should be on by default or NOT ALLOWED IN BENCHMARKS!
• Increase server utilisation to most effectively reduce power consumed! Servers are very very inefficient at low-utilisation!
• look at watt-performance NOT perf/watt when comparing servers!
• replace incandescents with CFL lights.

Disclosure Statement:

SPEC, SPECweb, SPECjbb, SPECjAppServer, SPEComp, and SPECpower benchmark name are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. VMware(R) VMmark(R) is a product of VMware, an EMC Company. Oracle, Siebel, registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. More info www.oracle.com/apps_benchmark/html/white-papers-siebel.html NotesBench R6iNotes More info: www.notesbench.org

AMD submits SPECpower_ssj for Intel

Friday Jan 09, 2009

George Ou wrote an article called "AMD submits suboptimal SPECpower benchmarks for Intel", pointing out that AMD submitted some results for Intel-based systems.

Of course, call foul on AMD for using eight 2GB dimms instead of four 4GB DIMMS. AMD did however use Low-Power FB-DIMMs on their Intel submission ("Memory Details: DDR2-667 CL5 LP FB-DIMM;"). But it begs the question why aren't Intel-based vendors using the same standard DIMMs as they use on other benchmarks that don't require power reporting?

OK let's dig deeper, maybe the AMD published Intel result do reveal something. Maybe memory configuration/size is critical to a servers watts? Let's look for some tidbits...

• Why are all SPECpower_ssj on 8GB to 16GB, while other benchmarks using the same CPU family are on 32GB to 64GB?
• Why did the reporters miss that Intel-based systems use a modified (hacked?) BIOS for SPECpower_ssj? Vendors using different BIOS than what is default for customers???
• SPEC data does show servers at low utilisation (anywhere under 50%) have much different power-performance that even 50% utilisation. There has got to be a story there?
• ... other "interesting" configuration choices for SPECpower_ssj

Why don't other vendors post measured watts on a variety of SPEC benchmarks? This gap of easy-to-measure data is the BIGGEST STORY.

Sun publishes measured watts, as I pointed out in yesterday's posting "Sun's 2008 summary of measured watts & watt/performance": http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/sun_s_2008_summary_of

Disclosure Statement

SPEC and the SPECpower benchmark name are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.

Sun's 2008 summary of measured watts & watt/performance

Thursday Jan 08, 2009

Sun has shown measured watts with measured performance on UltraSPARC for over four years!:
2008: UltraSPARC T2+ T5240 & UltraSPARC T2+ T5440
2007: UltraSPARC T2
2005: UltraSPARC T1 & T2000 blogs with power-performance

Sun is now showing measured watts with measured performance for Xeon-based and Opteron-based servers as well, Sun is saying we are going see a lot more soon:
2008 Xeon: Virtualization, Web
2008 Opteron: Java, Mail, Web

Real measured watts on a variety of workloads with real-sized memory configurations is critical to truly inform customers. I heard that one vendor was giving out top-secret watt measurements in a 16C datacentre (61F) as a way to lower their watt numbers... but does that make any real sense? But let's look at the big picture: Datacentre managers need to be look at by "power usage effectiveness" (PUE). To keep a datacentre that cold you need to burn LOTS of watts -- so great way to slash your server numbers for marketing, but really net loss for a real customer.

Sun is looking at a variety of ways to save customers money. Take a look at this ZDnet article "Some like it hot: Why waste dough cooling down a data center?"

Expect to see many more measured results from Sun in 2009... its been years will any other system vendor step up and show the same or will they just do slick marketing and give you dozens of reasons why they can't give you a number you can simply measure? ...or ask you just to measure idle?

SAP-SD 2-Tier and Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000/32 SPARC64 VII

Wednesday Jan 07, 2009

The 32-way Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 with 2.52 GHz SPARC64 VII processors, 32 processors / 128 cores / 256 threads, achieved 24,650 users on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard SAP ERP 6.0 (2005) application benchmark.

The 32-way Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 gets to 69% of the per-cpu result of largest configuration 32-way IBM p595 (POWER6 5.0 GHz, 64 cores total). Note the Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 can be configured as a 64-way system.

SAP-SD 2-Tier Performance Table (in decreasing performance order)

System	OS Database	Users	SAP ERP/ECC Release	SAPS	SAPS/ Proc	Date
Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 64xSPARC64 VII @2.52GHz 1024 GB	Solaris 10 Oracle 10g	39,100	2005 6.0	196,564	3,071	14-Jul-08
IBM Power 595 32xPOWER6 @5.0GHz 64 cores, 512 GB	AIX 6.1 DB2 9.5	35,400	2005 6.0	177,950	5,561	08-Apr-08
HP Integrity SD64B 64xItanium2 @1.6GHz 128 cores, 512 GB	HP-UX 11iV3 Oracle 10g	30,000	2005 6.0	152,530	2,383	18-Dec-06
Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 64xSPARC64 VI @2.4GHz 1024 GB	Solaris 10 Oracle 10g	25,130	2005 6.0	129,420	2,022	11-Jul-08
Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 32xSPARC64 VII @2.52GHz 512 GB	Solaris 10 Oracle 10g	24,650	2005 6.0	123,470	3,858	17-Dec-08
IBM p5 595 64xPOWER5+ @2.3GHz 64 cores, 512 GB	AIX 5.3 DB2 9	23,456	2004 5.0	117,520	1,836	25-Jul-06
Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 16xSPARC64 VI @2.4GHz 256 GB	Solaris 10 Oracle 10g	7,300	2005 6.0	36,570	2,285	17-Apr-07

SAP ERP 6.0 (2005) application benchmark is a bit more heavy-weight than mySAP ERP 2004 (SAP ECC 5.0), which has a performance impact of ~2-3%.

Complete benchmark results may be found at the SAP benchmark website http://www.sap.com/benchmark.

Benchmark Description

The SAP Standard Application SD (Sales and Distribution) Benchmark is a two-tier ERP business test that is indicative of full business workloads of complete order processing and invoice processing, and demonstrates the ability to run both the application and database software on a single system. The SAP Standard Application SD Benchmark represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments.

SAP is one of the premier world-wide ERP application providers, and maintains systems on the various SAP products.

Disclosure Statement:

Two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard SAP ERP 6.0 (2005) application benchmark as of 12/17/08: Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 (32 processors, 128 cores, 256 threads) 32 x 2.52 GHz SPARC64 VII, 512GB memory, 24,650 SD benchmark users, Cert#2008075, Oracle 10g, Solaris 10, SAP ECC Release 6.0; Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 (64 processors, 256 cores, 512 threads) 64 x 2.52 GHz SPARC64 VII, 1024GB memory, 39,100 SD benchmark users, Cert#2008042, Oracle 10g, Solaris 10, SAP ECC Release 6.0; Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 (64 processors, 128 cores, 256 threads) 64 x 2.4 GHz SPARC64 VI, 1024GB memory, 25,130 SD benchmark users, Cert#2008040, Oracle 10g, Solaris 10, SAP ECC Release 6.0; Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 (16 processors, 32 cores, 64 threads) 16 x 2.4 GHz SPARC64 VI, 256GB memory, 7,300 SD benchmark users, Cert#2007026, Oracle 10g, Solaris 10, SAP ECC Release 6.0; IBM Power 595 (32 processors, 64 cores, 128 threads), 35,400 SD benchmark users, 32 x 5.0 GHz POWER6, 512 GB, DB2 9.5, AIX 6.1, Cert. 2008019, SAP ECC Release 6.0; IBM System p5 595 (64 processors, 64 cores, 128 threads), 23,456 SD benchmark users, 64 x 2.3 GHz POWER5+, 512 GB, DB2 9, AIX 5.3, Cert. 2006045, SAP ECC Release 5.0; HP Integrity SD64B (64 processors, 128 cores, 256 threads), 30,000 SD benchmark users, 64 x 1.6 GHz Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2, 512 GB, Oracle 10g, HP-UX 11iV3, Cert#2006089, SAP ECC Release 6.0; SAP, R/3, mySAP reg TM of SAP AG in Germany and other countries. More info http://www.sap.com/benchmark.

SAP-SD 2-Tier benchmark Summary

Certified Results
	Performance:		24,650 benchmark users
	Server:		Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000
	Processors:		32 x 2.52 GHz SPARC64 VII
	Memory:		512 GB
	Operating system:		Solaris 10
	Database S/W:		Oracle 10g
	SAP S/W:		SAP ECC 6.0
	SAP Certification:		#2008075
	Storage:		1 x Internal System Disk 8 x Sun StorageTek(tm) 6140 Arrays

World Record SPECmail2008 Sun Fire X4540

Wednesday Jan 07, 2009

Sun often leads in publishing new benchmarks, now we have to wait for other vendors to publish, and probably a LOT longer for those same vendors to published measured watt with full-configuration performant benchmark results.

Sun has published the best SPECmail2008 to date on the Sun Fire X4540 server, demonstrates Sun's leadership position in Mail Serving. The results highlights the features of the Sun Fire X4540 single system, which includes 48x internal drives [250GB SATA] in a 4RU packaging, and it was obtained using the highly available ZFS file system, offering continuous integrity checking and automatic repair.

The Sun Fire X4540 server, equipped with two quad-core 2.3GHz Opteron 2356, Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.2 JES4, the ZFS File System and Solaris 10 Operating System, has achieved the overall record of 3300 SPECmail_MSEnt2008 SMTP and IMAP users at 15,868 SPECmail2008 Sessions/hour.

This benchmark result clearly demonstrates that a single Sun's X4540 with integrated storage, together with the Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.2 with ZFS on Solaris can support a large, enterprise level IMAP Mail server environment at the highest level of throughput performance, representing a compact, low cost and low power solution.

The Sun Fire X4540 server with 32GB of memory and forty-eight 250GB SATA Internal Disks had an average power consumption of 924 Watts, measured during the SPECmail2008 benchmark steady state.

Published Benchmark Results, SPECmail2008 (ordered by performance)

System	Processors				Performance
	Ch	Co	GHz	Type	SPECmail_MSEnt2008 Users	SPECmail2008 Sessions/hour
Sun Fire X4540	2	8	2.3	2356	3300	15,868
Sun Fire X4200 M2	2	4	2.8	2220 DC	2500	12,019

Complete benchmark results may be found at the SPEC benchmark website http://www.spec.org

Note: Number of SPECmail_MSEnt2008 users (bigger is better), SPECmail2008 Sessions/hour (bigger is better) , Ch/Co: Chips, Cores

Benchmark Description

SPECmail2008 is an industry standard client server benchmark designed to measure a system's ability to act as a mail server compliant with the Internet standards Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Internet Mail Application Protocol, Version 4 (IMAP4). The benchmark models business user behavior by simulating a real world workload experienced by enterprised based email services. The goal of SPECmail2008 is to enable objective comparisons of mail server products.

Software on one or more client machines generates a benchmark load for a System Under Test (SUT) and measures the SUT response times. A SUT can be a mail server running on a single system or a cluster of systems.

A SPECmail2008 'run' simulates a 100% load level associated with the specific number of users, as defined in the configuration file. The mail server must maintain a specific Quality of Service (QoS) at the 100% load level to produce a valid benchmark result. If the mail server does maintain the specified QoS at the 100% load level, the performance of the mail server is reported as SPECmail_MSEnt2008 SMTP and IMAP Users at SPECmail2008 Sessions per hour. The SPECmail_MSEnt2008 users at SPECmail2008 Sessions per Hour metric reflects the unique workload combination for a SPEC IMAP4 user.

Disclosure Statement:

SPEC, SPECmail reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results as of 1/6/09 on http://www.spec.org. SPECmail2008: Sun Fire X4540 (8 cores, 2 chip) 3300 SPECmail_MSEnt2008 users at 15,868 SPECmail2008 Sessions/hour. Sun Fire X4200 M2 (4 cores, 2 chip) 2500 SPECmail_MSEnt2008 users at 12,019 SPECmail2008 Sessions/hour.

Results Summary

	Performance:		3300 SPECmail_MSEnt2008 users at 15,868 IMAP SPECmail2008 sessions/hour
	Reference Date:		December 2, 2008
Systems:			Sun Fire X4540
Total Number Sockets:			2
Total Number Cores:			8
Processor/GHz of Server:			AMD Opteron 2356 DC 2.3GHz
Operating System:			Solaris 10 5/08
Mail Server:			Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.2 JES4

SPECweb2005 Sun Fire X4450 four 2.933 GHz Quad-core X7350 Xeons

Monday Dec 08, 2008

The Sun Fire X4450 64GB with four 2.933 GHz Quad-core Xeon X7350 obtained 39,793 SPECweb2005 using only 883 watts. The Sun Fire X4450 was running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 with Accoria Networks, Rock Web Server v1.4.7 and Rock JSP/Servlet Container v1.3.2. This result demonstrates Sun Microsystems continued commitment to deliver the high performing servers, regardless of operating system environments.

The Sun Fire X4450 with 2.933GHz QC Xeons with 64GB of memory had an average power consumption of 883 watts. The average power consumption was measured for each of the three SPECweb2005 benchmark workloads during the steady state load period at peak load. The power-performance for the Sun Fire X4450 is .022, power-performance is computed as watt/performance. Since power-performance is related to price/performance they are both calculated with performance in the denominator.

This result is competitive to the HP ProLiant DL580 G5, HP's 4 socket Xeon X7350 offering.

The Sun Fire X4450 with 4x10Gb network links obtained similar performance to the HP DL580 G5 with 16x1Gb network links. By obtaining similar performance with fewer networks, IT management costs and server power consumption are reduced.

Competitive Landscape

Selected SPECweb2005 benchmark results as of 12/04/2008. Complete information at: http://www.spec.org website.

System OS	Chips, Cores /Chip	CPU (GHz)	Web Server	SPEC web 2005	Bank	Ecom	Supp
HP PL DL585 G5 RedHat Linux	4, 4	AMD 8356 QC (2.3)	Rock1.4.7/ JRock v1.3.2	43854	76032	62304	39456
Fujitsu RX600 S4 RedHat Linux	4, 4	Xeon QC X7350 (2.93)	Rock1.4.7/ JRock v1.3.2	42783	75008	59264	39040
Sun SE T5220 Sol 10 05/08	1, 8	US T2 (1.4)	Sun JSWS 7.0 U3	41847	70000	58000	40000
HP PL DL580 G5 RedHat Linux	4, 4	Xeon QC X7350 (2.93)	Rock1.4.6/JRock v1.3.1	40046	71104	55552	36032
Sun Fire X4450 SLES 10 SP2	4, 4	Xeon QC X7350 (2.93)	Rock1.4.7/ JRock v1.3.2	39793	70500	57000	34750
Sun Fire X4240 RedHat Linux	2, 4	AMD QC 2360SE (2.5)	Rock1.4.7/ JRock v1.3.2	32288	53048	50008	28120
HP PL DL580 G5 RedHat Linux	4, 4	Xeon QC X7350 (2.93)	Rock1.4.1/JRock v1.2.0	30261	52160	42048	28000
HP PL DL385 G5 RedHat Linux	2, 4	AMD 2356 QC (2.3)	Rock1.4.6/JRock v1.3.1	30007	50856	46020	25584
HP PL DL380 G5 RedHat Linux	2,4	Xeon QC X5460 (3.16)	Rock1.4.6/ JRock v1.3.1	29591	51840	46512	23816
IBM p5 550 SuSE Linux	2, 2	DC Pow5+ (1.9)	Zeus4.3r1/ Tomcat 5.5.9	7881	12240	11820	7500

Measured power consumption from Sun Fire X4450 64GB with 4 2.933GHz QC Xeon, smaller watt/performance is better.

System	Work- load Ave	watt / perf	Banking		Ecomm		Support
			Avg Watts	Min, Max Watt	Avg Watt	Min, Max Watt	Avg Watt	Min, Max Watt
1 x Sun Fire X4450 64GB 4-chip 2.93GHz QC Xeon	883w	.0222	903w	781w, 923w	881w	620w, 906w	867w	734w, 897w
1 x Sun Fire T5220 64GB 1-chip 1.4GHz US T2	617w	.0147
1 x Sun Fire X4240 32GB 2-chip 2.5GHz QC Opteron	521w	.0161

At peak load, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 with 64GB had an average power consumption of 617 watts for the three SPECweb2005 benchmark workloads at steady-state measured watts during benchmark run. A blog about this result at: http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/sun_s_even_faster_specweb2005

At peak load, the Sun SPARC Enterprise X4240 with 32GB had an average power consumption of 521 watts for the three SPECweb2005 benchmark workloads at steady-state measured watts during benchmark run.

You can look up competitive watts at:
HP DL580 power consumption from HP Power Calculator system configured with 4 x2.93GHz processors, redundant PSU, 16 x 4GB DIMMs, 8 x 36GB SAS drives,1 x PCI card, 80% utilisation: http://h30099.www3.hp.com/configurator/powercalcs.asp

HP DL380G5 power consumption from HP Power Calculator for system configured with 2 x X5460 3.16GHz processors, redundant PSU, 8 x 4GB DIMMs, 2 x HBAs and 2 x 146GB SAS drives, 80% utilisation: http://h30099.www3.hp.com/configurator/powercalcs.asp

Benchmark Description

SPECweb2005, is the latest industry standard benchmark for evaluating Web Server performance developed by SPEC. The benchmark simulates multiple user sessions accessing a Web Server and generating static and dynamic HTTP requests. The major features of SPECweb2005 are:

• Measures simultaneous user sessions
• Dynamic content: currently PHP and JSP implementations
• Page images requested using 2 parallel HTTP connections
• Multiple, standardized workloads: Banking (HTTPS), E-commerce (HTTP and HTTPS), and Support (HTTP)
• Simulates browser caching effects
• File accesses more accurately simulate today's disk access patterns
  

Example Disclosure Statement:

Sun Fire X4450 (16 cores, 4 chips) 39793 SPECweb2005.  HP ProLiant DL585 G5 ( 16 core, 4 chips) 43854 SPECweb2005.  Fujitsu Siemems Primergy RX600 S4 (16 cores, 4 chips) 42783  SPECweb2005.  Sun SPARC Enterprise X5220 (8 cores, 1 chip) 41847 SPECweb2005.  HP ProLiant DL585 G5 (16 cores/4 chips) 40046 SPECweb2005 (re-run of 2.93GHz).  Sun Fire X4240 (8 cores, 2 chips) 32288 SPECweb2005.  HP ProLiant DL585 G5 (16 cores, 4 chips) 30261 SPECweb2005 (initial 2.93 GHz run).  HP ProLiant DL385 G5 (8 cores, 2 chips) 30007 SPECweb2005.  HP ProLiant DL380 G5 (8 cores, 2 chips) 29591 SPECweb2005. PRIMERGY TX300 S4 (8 cores, 2 chips) 28127 SPECweb2005.  IBM p5 550 (4 cores, 2 chips) 7881 SPECweb2005. SPEC, SPECweb reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of Dec 4, 2008.

Sun Fire X4450 server power consumption was taken from measurements made during the benchmark runs of each workload at peak load, during the steady state load period. The power is the average measured watts during the benchmark run.

Results Summary

Results		39793 SPECweb2005
Reference Date:		Dec 4, 2008
Systems:		1 x Sun Fire X4450, 64GB
Total Number Processors:		4 chips / 4 cores per chip
Processor/GHz of Server:		4 x Xeon 7350 2.933 GHz
Operating System:		SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2
Software:		Rock Web Server v1.4.7 & Rock JSP/Servlet Container v1.3.2
		Java HotSpot[TM] 64-Bit Server VM on Linux, Version 1.6.0_06 Performance Release

SunSSH with HW crypto support on UltraSPARC T2

Wednesday Dec 03, 2008

In case you missed it: SunSSH with HW crypto support on UltraSPARC T2. This has now been back-ported to Solaris 10 Update 7. You can read more about it at this blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/janp/entry/sunssh_with_hw_crypto_support

Zeus ZXTM ADC and Sun's CMT lead in perf & price-perf

Wednesday Nov 26, 2008

Over that the Zeus website, they posted information on Zeus Technology’s ZXTM (Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager).

Zeus shows performance data from their testing on QC Xeons, older DC Opterons, f5's Big-IP, Citrix, and Sun's CMT on HTTP throughput tests. What the data shows is the Sun Fire T5140 (1.2GHz, 2-socket) is the fastest 2-socket system.

Estimating from the graph the Sun Fire T5140 looks to have almost 3x better price peformance than f5's BIG-IP VIPRION and 2.5x better Citrix.

You can read more about it at:
http://www.zeus.com/news/press_articles/zeus-price-performance-press-release.html?gclid=CLn4jLuuk5cCFQsQagod7gTkJA

As they say, "Voice-over-IP (VoIP) services are converging on SIP and RTP for signaling and real-time media delivery respectively."

I'll post more details on this test as I find them.

Onwards to that most 'merican of holidays, T-day. Enjoy your holiday!

T5440 World Record SPECjAppServer Single Application Server

Monday Nov 24, 2008

One Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server with four UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors at 1.4GHz, delivered a single system World Record result of 6334.86 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 consumed an average of 1578 Watts of power to obtain this result for a power-performance rating of 0.25 Watts/JOP.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server (four 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips) demonstrated 32% better performance over the HP DL580 G5 result of 4410.07 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard, which used four 2.66 GHz Intel 6-core Xeon processors.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server (four 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips) demonstrated 75% better performance over the HP DL580 G5 result of 3339.94 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard, which used four 2.93 GHz Intel 4-core Xeon processors.

This benchmark used the Oracle WebLogic 10.3 Application Server and Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition. This benchmark result proves that the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server using the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor performs as an outstanding J2EE application server as well as an Oracle 11g OLTP database server.

This result used a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server (four 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips) in the database tier to obtain this World Record result. This Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 consumed an average of 1463 Watts of power to obtain this result for a power-performance rating of 0.23 Watts/JOP.

These results were obtained using Sun Java SE 6 Update 6 Performance Release on the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server and running the Solaris 10 10/08 Operating Environment.

The power-performance metric is a measure of server efficiency ratio that includes system power & performance consumption on a specific benchmark. (Power-performance = Watts / Performance).

Sun publishes watts on this SPEC benchmark, why won't HP on the 6core systems with this size memory?

Performance Landscape

SPECjAppServer2004 Performance Chart as of 10/13/2008. Complete benchmark results may be found at the SPEC benchmark website http://www.spec.org. SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard (bigger is better)

Submitter	SPECjApp Server2004 JOPS@Standard	J2EE Server	DB Server
Sun	6334.86	1x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 32 cores, 4 chips @ 1.4 GHz US-T2 Plus Oracle WebLogic 10.3	1x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 32 cores, 4 chips @ 1.4 GHz US-T2 Plus Oracle 11g DB 11.1.0.7
HP	4410.07	1x ProLiant DL580 G5 24 cores, 4 chips @ 2.66 GHz Xeon X7460 Oracle WebLogic 10.3	1x ProLiant DL580 G5 24 cores, 4 chips @ 2.66 GHz Xeon X7460 Oracle 11g DB 11.1.0.6
HP	3339.94	1x ProLiant DL580 G5 16 cores, 4 chips @ 2.93 GHz Xeon X7350 Oracle WebLogic 10.3	1x ProLiant DL580 G5 16 cores, 4 chips @ 2.93 GHz Xeon X7350 Oracle 11g DB 11.1.0.6

Benchmark Description

SPECjAppServer2004 (Java Application Server) is a multi-tier benchmark for measuring the performance of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology-based application servers. SPECjAppServer2004 is an end-to-end application which exercises all major J2EE technologies implemented by compliant application servers as follows:

• The web container, including servlets and JSPs
• The EJB container
• EJB2.0 Container Managed Persistence
• JMS and Message Driven Beans
• Transaction management
• Database connectivity

Moreover, SPECjAppServer2004 also heavily exercises all parts of the underlying infrastructure that make up the application environment, including hardware, JVM software, database software, JDBC drivers, and the system network.

The primary metric of the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark is jAppServer Operations Per Second (JOPS) which is calculated by adding the metrics of the Dealership Management Application in the Dealer Domain and the Manufacturing Application in the Manufacturing Domain. There is NO price/performance metric in this benchmark.

Results Summary

Results			6334.86 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard
Reference Date:			Nov 20, 2008
Systems:			2x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440
Total Number Processors:			4, 4
Processor/GHz of Server:			UltraSPARC T2 Plus 1.4 GHz
Operating System:			Solaris 10 10/08
Software:			Oracle WebLogic 10.3 Application Server, Standard Edition
			Oracle Database Enterprise Edition Release 11.1.0.7
JVM:			JDK 1.6.0_06 Performance Release

Disclosure Statement:

SPECjAppServer2004
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 (4 chips, 32 cores) 6334.86 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. HP DL580 G5 (4 chips, 24 cores) 4410.07 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. HP DL580 G5 (4 chips, 16 cores) 3339.94 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. SPEC, SPECjAppServer reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 10/13/08

SPECjAppServer2004 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 (16 cores, 2 chip) 3331.31 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. IBM p570(4 cores, 2 chips) 1197.51 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. IBM p550(4 cores, 2 chips) 1197.51 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. SPEC, SPECjAppServer reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 04/09/2008. Power References: IBM p6 570 power specifications from 80% of maximum report power consumption published here, 06/07/07, posted at ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_sp/n/PSB01628USEN/PSB01628USEN.PDF IBM p5 power specifications calculated by applying 70% of the power numbers published in ?Facts and Features Report?, 3/10/06, posted at http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/hardware/factsfeatures.html

SPEComp2001 Sun Blade X6440 x86 world Record and measured watts

Thursday Nov 20, 2008

The Sun Blade X6440 server module (2.7 GHz Opteron 8384 'Shanghai') running OpenSolaris 2008.05 and using Sun Studio Express 11/08 compilers delivers a World Record SPECompM2001 x86 16-threads result of 35896.

Sun Blade X6440 server module (2.7 GHz Opteron 8384 'Shanghai') was 19% faster on SPECompM2001 while consuming 9% less power (measured in watts), over the same Sun Blade with AMD Opteron 8356 processors.

very editorial note: Sun continues to measure watts on actual performance benchmark runs on real-sized memory configurations, this number of benchmark expands beyond Sun's CMT platforms this list continues to expand.  The SPEComp  results was run with 32GB on the Sun Blade. If your vendor does not measure watts, then you really need to ask yourself why they avoid publicly showing everyone easy to measure data.

The Sun system beat the Supermicro H8QM8 result by 4%, even though the X6440 uses DDR667 memory and the Supermicro uses DDR800 memory. This was made possible by using OpenSolaris 2008.5 plus the Sun Studio Express 11/08 compiler rather than SuSE Linux 10 SP1 with the PathScale compiler used by Supermicro.

Press Release content on www.sun.com

SPEComp2001 Performance Chart - SPECompM2001 (bigger is better, ordered by peak)

Result		Cores	Chips	Thrds	System
Peak	Base
35896	32843	16	4	16	Sun Blade X6440 (Opteron 8384 2.7GHz)
34415	33086	16	4	16	Supermicro H8QM8 (Opteron 8384 2.7GHz)
30275	29094	16	4	16	AMD Tyan Thunder 425QE (Opteron 8360 2.5GHz)
30228	27568	16	4	16	Sun Blade X6440 (Opteron 8356 2.3GHz)
28283	27001	16	4	16	AMD Tyan Thunder 425QE (Opteron 8356 2.3GHz)

Benchmark Description

The SPEC OMPM2001 Benchmark Suite was released in June 2001 and tests HPC performance using OpenMP for parallelism.

• 11 programs (3 in C and 8 in Fortran) parallelized using OpenMP API

Goals of suite:

• Targeted to mid-range (4-32 processor) parallel systems
• Run rules, tools and reporting similar to SPEC CPU2006
• Programs representative of HPC and Scientific Applications

Power data in watts all results using OpenSolaris 2008.05, watts are measured on a single blade.  As with any vendor multiple blades can be put into a single chassis.

Configuration	System State	Max. Power drawn in watts
Single X6440 Blade 32GB (16x2GB DDR667) 4x Opteron 8384 2.7GHz	During run of SPECompM2001	532 Watts
Single X6440 Blade 32GB (16x2GB DDR667) 4xAMD Opteron 8356 2.3GHz	During run of SPECompM2001	578 Watts
Systemwide Power saving AMD Opteron 8384 vs AMD Opteron 8356	During run of SPECompM2001	46 Watts or 9%
Single X6440 Blade 32GB (16x2GB DDR667) 4x Opteron 8384 2.7GHz	System active idle	195 Watts
Single X6440 Blade 32GB (16x2GB DDR667) 4x Opteron 8356 2.3GHz	System active idle	205 Watts

Disclosure Statement:

SPEC, SPEComp reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of Nov 19, 2008 and this report. Sun Blade X6440 (4 cores, 4 chips, 16 threads, Opteron 8384 2.7GHz), 35,896 SPECompM2001; Supermicro H8QM8 (4 cores, 4 chips, 16 threads, Opteron 8384 2.7GHz), 34415 SPECompM2001; AMD Tyan Thunder 425QE (4 cores, 4 chips, 16 threads, Opteron 8360 2.5GHz), 30275 SPECompM2001; Sun Blade X6440 (4 cores, 4 chips, 16 threads, Opteron 8356 2.3GHz), 30228 SPECompM2001; AMD Tyan Thunder 425QE0 (4 cores, 4 chips, 16 threads, Opteron 8356 2.3GHz), 28283 SPECompM2001.

Result
	X6440 16-threads:		35896 SPECompM2001
Reference Date:			Nov 18, 2008
System:			Sun Blade X6440
Total Number Processors:			4
Total Memory :			32 GB (16x2GB DDR2-667MHz)
Processor/GHz of Server:			AMD Opteron 8384, 2.7 GHz
Operating System:			OpenSolaris 2008.05
Compiler:			Sun Studio Express 11/08

Perf blogs on the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Family

Wednesday Nov 12, 2008

We've posted quite a few performance results with the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Family.  I've put all of the links together from BM Seer blog and some others.  Recap.  Ready, steady, go...

Application Performance Testing with Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Family

Wowza Media Sun Storage 7210 Unified Storage Array
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/wowza_media_sun_storage_7210
http://blogs.sun.com/cdnperf/entry/a_video_streaming_solution_using

ANSYS using Sun Storage 7410 with the Sun Blade X6250
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/ansys_using_sun_storage_7410

Web 2.0 Consolidation Sun Storage 7410 Unified storage array
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/web_2_0_consolidation_sun
http://blogs.sun.com/mheckel/entry/sun_storage_7410_unified_storage

Database Performance and Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage Array
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/database_performance_and_sun_storage

Lower-Level Performance Testing with Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Family

RAID Rebuild Performance Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage Array
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/raid_rebuild_performance_sun_storage

Low Level Performance Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage Array
(Note: Updated since original posting!)
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/low_level_performance_sun_storage
http://blogs.sun.com/roch/entry/designing_performance_metrics_for_sun
http://blogs.sun.com/hotnets/entry/analyzing_the_sun_storage_7000

Navel of Narcissus posts the following about the simulator:
Unified Storage Simulator: Too Fun to be Legal
http://blogs.sun.com/simons/entry/unified_storage_simulator_too_fun