BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

SPECjAppServer Sun T5140/T5440

Friday Feb 13, 2009

Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5440 Delivers Outstanding Application and Database Performance on SPECjAppServer2004. Yet again, Sun is showing measured watts on another benchmark. I encourage all other vendors to do the same on all benchmarks. We all need this kind of transparency!

Four Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 Servers and 1 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server delivered a result of 9500.76 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. ZFS was also used in this benchmark.

One Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server in the application tier, consumed on average 614 Watts of power and the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server in the database tier, consumed on average 1836 Watts of power during the execution of this benchmark.

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 Oracle 11g OLTP database server.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140, T5440 and M3000 servers used to produce this benchmark result all used the Solaris 10 10/8 Operating Environment.

Four Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 Servers and 1 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server demonstrated better performance compared to the HP result of 9459.19 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard which used 11x HP BL860c servers and 2x HP Superdomes.

Each Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server used 4 instances of Oracle WebLogic 10.3 and the Sun JVM 1.6.0_06 Performance Release in Solaris Containers. Each Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server used ZFS to mirror 2 Solid State Disks to meet the benchmark durable storage requirements for the application server logs and JMS Persistence filestore.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server in the database tier used Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) to manage the StorageTek 2540 and 2501 storage arrays for the database files and redo logs.

The Sun result of 9500.76 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard using one Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 in the database tier used 24 Oracle licenses for the database. The HP result of 10519.43 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard using one HP Superdome in the database tier used 40 Oracle database licenses. The Sun T5440 delivered 90% of the performance using 60% of the database licenses compared to the HP Superdome.

The Sun result of 9500.76 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard using one Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 in the database tier used 4 Rack Units of space (H x W x D = 7" x 18" x 25" = 1.8 cu feet). The HP result of 10519.43 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard using the HP Superdome database (a 40 processor partition in 2x A9834A cabinets), have space requirements of (H x W x D = 72" x 48" x 45" = 90 cu feet). The Sun T5440 occupies 1/50 of the datacenter space at 90% of the performance of an HP Superdome.

The Sun result of 9500.76 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard using one Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 in the database tier consumed on average 1836 watts of power during the execution of this benchmark. The HP result of 10519.43 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard using the HP Superdome database (a 40 processor partition in 2x A9834A cabinets), have power requirements of 13720 watts(1) or 7.5 TIMES more than Sun's T5440. The Sun T5440 consumes 14% of the power at 90% of the performance of an HP Superdome.

Performance Comparisons

SPECjAppServer2004 Performance Chart as of 02/04/2009. Complete benchmark results may be found at the SPEC benchmark website http://www.spec.org. SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard (bigger is better)

Submitter SPECjAppServer2004
JOPS@Standard
J2EE Server DB Server
HP 10519.43 12x HP BL860c
4 cores, 2 chips @ 1.66 GHz Itanium 9100
Oracle OC4J 10.1.3.3.2
1x HP Superdome
40 cores, 20 chips @ 1.6 GHz Itanium 9000
Oracle 10g DB 10.2.0.3
Sun 9500.76 4x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140
16 cores, 2 chips @ 1.2 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 9459.19 11x HP BL860c
4 cores, 2 chips @ 1.66 GHz Itanium 9100
Oracle OC4J 10.1.3.3.2
2x HP Superdome
80 cores, 40 chips @ 1.6 GHz Itanium 9000
Oracle 10g DB 10.2.0.3 with RAC
Sun 8439.366 6x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120
8 cores, 1 chip @ 1.4 GHz US-T2
Sun Java System Application Server
1x Sun SPARC Enterprise E6900
48 cores, 24 chips @ 1.95 GHz US-IV+
IBM DB2 V9.1

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 servelets 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.

Disclosure Statement:

SPECjAppServer2004: 4x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 (8 chips, 64 cores) 9500.76 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. 12x HP BL860c (24 chips, 48 cores) 10519.43 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. 12x HP BL860c (22 chips, 44 cores) 9459.19 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. 6x Sun T5120 (6 chips, 48 cores) 8439.36 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. SPEC, SPECjAppServer reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 1/28/09.

1. HP Integrity Superdome using 2x A9834A cabinets. Taking 70% of Typical Input power of 9800 watts for an 8-cell cabinet and from: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/11717_div/11717_div.HTML

See Also: SPECjAppServer2004 Results Page

Results Summary

Published Results 9500.76 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard
Reference Date: Feb 4, 2009
Systems: 4x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140
1x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440
1x Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000
Total Number Processors: 2, 4, 1
Processor/GHz of Server: UltraSPARC T2 Plus 1.2 GHz
UltraSPARC T2 Plus 1.4 GHz
SPARC64VII 2.52 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

note: ...as always you can post comments anonymously, but if you work for a system's vendor you should state who it is.

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