Putting the T5120 to the test
One of our first T5120 systems for testing was sent to Strato, one of the largest web hosts in Europe. Without much ado, the systems engineer put it to good use as an http server for static and dynamic content and compared it to a T2000. The new server immediately performed almost twice as fast as the T2000.
In another test, the T5120 was added to an existing load balancer group with four T2000 systems. The test system was configured to balance three times as much load as a single T2000. So the balancing was basically distributed among 7 units where the T5120 alone supported almost half (3/7) of all the load balancing activity. At that configuration, the T5120 was still running 50% idle during peak internet traffic.
All in all, Strato appears to be really happy with the new T5120. According to the system engineer, upgrading from a T2000 was really easy as the new T5120 virtually behaves the same, just faster. Besides, if you've installed an X4200 before, you are already familiar with the service processor and you should be able to start your installation immediately. Apart from upgrading to Solaris 10 U4, nothing else was necessary to kick start the system provided by the Early Access team.
Here's a summary in the customer's own words:
In another test, the T5120 was added to an existing load balancer group with four T2000 systems. The test system was configured to balance three times as much load as a single T2000. So the balancing was basically distributed among 7 units where the T5120 alone supported almost half (3/7) of all the load balancing activity. At that configuration, the T5120 was still running 50% idle during peak internet traffic.
All in all, Strato appears to be really happy with the new T5120. According to the system engineer, upgrading from a T2000 was really easy as the new T5120 virtually behaves the same, just faster. Besides, if you've installed an X4200 before, you are already familiar with the service processor and you should be able to start your installation immediately. Apart from upgrading to Solaris 10 U4, nothing else was necessary to kick start the system provided by the Early Access team.
Here's a summary in the customer's own words:
As Europe's second largest web host, we are always interested in testing new solutions that enable us to deliver the highest levels of service to our customers, at the lowest cost. We were one of Sun's first customers of the Sun Fire T2000 server and were delighted that this system enabled us to dramatically reduce power by over 70% and space by almost 60% in our data centers.
The new Sun SPARC Enterprise T5x20 servers will enable us to significantly extend our ability to scale quickly and efficiently, while further reducing costs. We estimate that the T5000 servers will deliver around 2.5x higher throughput than the existing T2000 servers when running our Apache web servers and mail servers, which has been proven in our testing. In terms of computing power, the T5000 offers a performance per watt ratio that is nearly doubled in a direct comparison to its predecessor the T2000. In other words, with the new line of Sun CMT-based servers, we will be able to save 43% of energy consumption compared to a direct replacement strategy of our existing T2000 servers. At the same time, we will use the extended functionality of the T5000 servers to run our floating point-intensive SPAM filters, and encrypt our SMTP traffic, ensuring higher levels of security for our customers These servers will enable us to meet our key objectives of efficiently scaling for the opportunities presented by the Participation Age. René Wienholtz, CTO, Strato AG
