Last week InfoWorld posted a very positive review of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, featuring the UltraSPARC T2 processor. The server scored 8.3 out of 10, a rating of "very good." The in-depth review discusses the new features that differentiate the T5120 from previous SPARC servers. The reviewer, Paul Venezia, discusses why the T2 processor is significant, stating, "this architecture is a significant departure from the rest of the industry, and positions these servers to fill specific, highly transactional roles, foregoing the rest. In that capacity, they do quite well."

Paul also highlights the (local) storage benefits of the T5120, which he cites as unusual -- given that the T5120 is built for computing not storage -- but that it is not unwelcome. He discusses running the T5120 with Solaris ZFS as it provides more storage options. He says, "it's easy to see the T5120 supplanting many physical SPARC-based servers by collapsing their workloads into Solaris Containers that feed from the T5120's 64-thread trough."

Finally, Paul provided a quick comparison of the T5120 running both Solaris and Ubuntu 7.10. For everyday tasks, he found the performance on both to be very similar, but stated that running Solaris resulted in better FPU and crypto performance.

Overall, this is a positive review for Sun that demonstrates the strength of our server products.

Mario Apicella's InfoWorld review of the Sun StorageTek 5800 posted today, and we did extremely well, scoring a 9.3 out of 10, or "Excellent" rating. Mario highlighted many of the ST5800's features, including its ability to quickly and automatically replace a failed master node with another node; its simplified administrative interface; and its storage management software commands that "are both intuitive and very powerful." Mario goes on to say, "How Honeycomb stores objects is one of the secrets to its reliability and persistence ... Having objects spread across multiple nodes and spindles also favors fast performance and quick rebuilds after failure." He included all performance tests he ran on the ST5800, including one where he abruptly pulled drives, shut down two nodes and killed one of the switches to trigger fail-over to the standby unit -- "In every case, the ST5800 kept on ticking and returned quickly to normal status when the failure was removed."

In an attempt to "stir the honeypot" and push the ST5800 to its limits, Mario also powered down two nodes and then pulled out another drive (understanding that, if the ST5800 lost 8 of its 64 drives, the system would go into quiescent mode). He was very much impressed that the machine came back online almost immediately after he restored the drive.

In conclusion, Mario states that the ST5800's "good performance, easy management and incredibly resilient architecture make it a very attractive archiving solution at a price that, although significant, will challenge many competitors."

InfoWorld reviewer Mario Apicella recently conducted a 3-day onsite evaluation of the Sun StorageTek 5800 System. We are expecting his full review in the near future. In the interim, he posted a blog on his evaluation this week, and mentioned that he "abruptly pulled out eight of its 64 drives, Honeycomb survived without losing data. No RAID system can compete with that."

(Image courtesy: Scott Camazine)

ZDNet's Paul Murphy continues to examines our forthcoming Rock hardware and compares it to Intel, Windows and the x86 infrastructure. According to him, "Sun's Rock is pretty cool hardware too -- a machine with the potential to side step the scaling issues that have traditionally limited SMP system expansion. As I understand it, the Rock hardware is sufficiently backward compatible that existing Solaris binaries for SPARC work -- but the big potential gains won't be realized without significant kernel, library, and application simplification ... If Linux continues to evolve as everyone's preferred solution for grid computing and IBM shifts much of the focus there to PPC and Cell -- while Sun rocks the SMP world with highly scalable solutions built on Solaris, then where does all that leave Windows and x86?" Where else? In the dust!!!

PC Magazine has posted a very positive review on the Sun Fire X4150 server as side bar to a round up review of other SMB-focused x64 servers. The review praises the powerful features and functions that are included in such a small box -- stating that "Sun has kept its new Sun Fire in a 1U enclosure but has sacrificed absolutely nothing in the way of hardware or management features, building a box capable of competing with servers twice its size."

Oliver Rist, the reviewer, goes on to list the CPU and driver components that are included on the system he tested, such as two quad-core Intel Xeons, 16GB of RAM and four 136GB 10,000-rpm SAS drives attached to an Adaptec RAID controller. He then positively highlights that the X4150 has "enough memory and disk space to run a heavy virtualization load in half of the space you'll find in most other server solutions ...[positioning] the Sun Fire as one of the greenest servers of 2008."

The review wraps up mentioning "... the Sun box would have blown the doors off anything else here" and Sun "deserves kudos for managing all this in a box this small."

PS: Had we known this opportunity in time, we would have sent a similarly configured and priced Sun Fire X4150 server that would have blown the doors off others anyway.

PPS: If you don't believe it, try it out free for 60 days via our Try & Buy program. You pick the configuation (and price range, we're sure you're going to buy it once you try... )

InformationWeek has an interesting article on data compliance in this week's print issue. Due to government regulations and internal policies, organizations need to retain data and be able to track and verify that this data has not been modified or deleted. This is particularly important in the finance and health-care industries. The InformationWeek article by Howard Marks focused on fixed content storage solutions that allow IT to store file data in a form that prevents end-users from modifying the data. This is where WORM (Write Once, Read Many) tapes come in play. Per Howard, "All popular tape formats, from LTO in the midrange to Sun Microsystems' T10000 at the high end, have firmware in the drive that identifies special WORM cartridges, and once data is written to them, prevents overwriting or erasure. With capacities of 800 GB per cartridge, WORM tape, especially if used behind a RAID cache, is the lowest-cost, and greenest, solution for very large archives where IT can deal with file access times measured in minutes. RAID, or even MAID, uses power when not being accessed."

The same problem can be solved using another approach -- by having WORM functionality via software on NAS appliances. We can add Sun StorEdge Compliance Archiving offering's software-managed WORM feature to our NAS appliance, and voila -- we get another solution to the data compliance problem!

And finally... Don't forget Honeycomb -- Sun StorageTek 5800 system is the first integrated, fixed-content archiving system built using open source software, and is excellent for preservation and digital archiving. From the product page: "The system includes extensive metadata facilities, extreme data protection against data corruption and data loss, and enhanced reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS)."

So what are you waiting for...

ZDNet's Paul Murphy discusses two CPU features -- thread scouting and transactional memory -- only found in our forthcoming Rock chip. His blog post notes, "The most obvious implication here is that Rock and its successors will allow Solaris kernel developers to make most these lock processes go away - and for applications that will initially mean simple re-compiles to take advantage of new libraries but in the longer term spark new designs eliminating many of the cycle absorbing complexities of present day multi-threading." An interesting read.

Octave Orgeron, Sparks and White Noise blogger and contributor to various USENIX publications, today published his full review of the T5120 and T5520 servers. Titled "The SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220," Octave opens the review by explaining that these products represent a huge advancement in server technology for SPARC customers and calls the servers "amazing." Octave explains that the UltraSPARC T2 processor is the second generation of the CMT processor design from Sun and notes that the processor is really a "system on a chip." Its built-in components, explains Octave, allow for higher throughput and reduced I/O overhead that would normally require external ASICs or option cards.

Octave covers virtualization as well and notes that one of the unique features of the UltraSPARC T1 and T2 servers is the ability to virtualize the server intro discreet virtual machines called logical domains through an integrated hypervisor, which provides additional layers or privileged access. He explains that this type of virtualization can increase the utilization of a single server in ways that previously were not even possible. It opens the door to consolidating development environments, infrastructure services, QA environment testing and production applications.

Octave summarizes the review by explaining that the Niagara servers offer many unique and exciting features that set it apart from the competition. He believes that the UltraSPARC T2 processor with 8 cores, 64 threats, 10Gb Ethernet, PCI-E, and cryptographic features are revolutionary in the computing industry, and ends by saying that it's amazing to think that not long ago, it would have taken a much larger and more expensive solution to equal the features and benefits of these servers.

A very nice comprehensive review!

1. T5120 First Impressions -- Sparks and White Noise, 12/20
Octave Oregon posts around the holidays boasting about the T5120 that is now set up in his home office. He explains that it came pre-loaded with Solaris 10 Update 4, JES, and teh LDM 1.0.1 software. He points out that the sound of the machine powering on is "like a jet getting ready to launch off an air-craft carrier."

2. A Peek under the Hood of the T5120 -- Sparks and White Noise, 12/20
In this blog, Octave Oregon explains several pictures that he has taken of the T5120. Some features that he likes best are the new look and the latch mechanism. He also explains that the machine offers a panel that allows you to access the fan modules without having to take apart the server. This blog by Oregon was very detailed and any reader who reads this blog can immediately sense his excitement.

3. Building 32-bit openssl libraries with the Sun C compiler -- Blog O' Matty, 12/30
Matty shares his experience while installing OpenSSL 0.9.8g on one of his servers. He noticed that 64-bit libraries are produced by default but to build 32-bit shared libraries he had run Configure with the "shared" and "solaris-x86-cc" otions.

4. More articles.. -- Sparks and White Noise, 12/28
Octave Oregon writes about how he will be writing his fourth and final article for ;login; on LDoms. He explains that he had massive amounts of material and sued Solaris 10 and Solaris Express on the T5120 for his tests and examples in his articles. He also concludes that these articles would not have been possible without the wonderful machine (the T5120).

Couple of months ago, InfoWorld was impressed with the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System offerings. Last week, they posted a follow-up podcast on our new Sun Blade 6000 Modular System offerings and how they are playing an important role in virtualization. Check out the review and the podcast.

ServerWatch posted a very positive evaluation of the Sun Fire X4600 server. The reviewer, Charlie Schluting, looked at the design, product features and performance of the machine -- and praised each of these areas individually.

• Design: Charlie highlights the changes in the internal design citing better airflow and cooling capabilities. He also praises the flexibility of operating system support and the ease of installation.

• Product Features: The review provides a list of the product features and components highlighting the benefit of each of these for use in determining hardware compatibility. Charlie highlights how the features included are strong, but are also based on industry standards making compatibility very easy.
  

• Performance: The evaluation looked specifically at speed of the server. Charlie ran four processes of Folding@Home and stated: "Performance, if you need any convincing at all, is sublime. Everything we threw at this server ran faster than we'd ever seen on other Opteron servers."

Charlie briefly highlights how to consolidate servers onto the X4600, stating that two of these machines could run the critical apps in a modest sized infrastructure. He wraps up his review stating: "Saying this server is "fast" doesn't really do it justice. Speed isn't nearly as important as good design, redundancy, and close attention to detail from a seasoned server manufacturer. Combine that with extreme flexibility and speed, and you have the X4600."

Two great reviews have appeared in InfoWorld last week.

In the first review titled "Sun ZFS breaks all the rules," the reviewer, Paul Venezia, praises the innovations in ZFS throughout the entire review. Consider his comments:

"The file system of the next 10 years will either be ZFS or something extremely similar. The fluidity, the malleability, and the scalability of ZFS far surpass anything available now on any platform."

"In order to bend your mind around what ZFS is and what it can do, you need to toss out just about everything you know about file systems and start over."

"It’s not every day that the computer industry delivers the level of innovation found in Sun's ZFS. More and more advances in the science of IT are based on simply multiplying the status quo. ZFS breaks all the rules here, and it arrives in an amazingly well-thought-out and nicely implemented solution."

"This is the kind of engineering that made Sun a powerhouse. "

In the second review, the Sun Fire X4500 server (running Solaris 10 with ZFS) scored an astounding 8.8 rating with "Excellent" recommendation. Paul is pretty impressed with the performance of the system. His parting thoughts: "Thumper is aptly named and is a truly unique product from a company that seems to be pulling away from a faltering reputation in the server market. Recent studies have shown that within a few short years, the world will generate more data than it can store. It would seem that Sun is doing its part to bridge that gap."

These reviews were complemented with a nice screencast of ZFS running on Thumper.

Great job, everyone in the product teams. Paul -- we are very happy to see that you liked the innovations in ZFS and Thumper.