This week, Sun announced a new 4-chip UltraSPARC T2 Plus system - delivered in a compact 4U, energy efficient, and low cost package. We expect this systems to be at the center of many ISV applications that have heavy scalability requirements Here's how our colleague Allan Packer describes the system.
Sun today announced the 4-chip variant of its UltraSPARC T2 Plus system, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440. Each UltraSPARC T2 Plus chip offers 8 hardware strands in each of 8 cores. With up to four UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips delivering a total of 32 cores and 256 hardware threads and up to 512Gbytes of memory in a compact 4U package, the T5440 raises the bar for server performance, price-performance, energy efficiency, and compactness. And with Logical Domains (LDoms) and Solaris Containers, the potential for server consolidation is compelling.
Our team in ISV Engineering has had access to early production systems to test ISV application workloads. We always have more applications queued up for testing than there is time and equipment available, but here is what we were able to highlight by the announcement time:
- Since the mid-1990's SAP AG has worked closely with its hardware partners on developing reliable and consistent benchmarks to measure the performance of their leading ERP and business application software. The most popular of these has been the SAP SD benchmark which mimics a sales and distribution workload with simulated users booking and shipping orders. The T5440 delivers the best 4 processor performance in the industry at 7510 concurrent users.1 I worked with the Sun team that produced some of the first world-record SAP benchmarks back in 1996. Today, if you dropped a T5440 on the ground, it might just chip the pavement. If you dropped the "kit" we used to produce the 600 user benchmark in 1996, it would have made a crater.
- We've been working with the Siebel PSPP workload since long before they joined forces with Oracle. The T5440 turned in an impressive 14,000 users besting our own previous T5120 performance of 10,000 users and absolutely leaving behind entries from IBM & HP. Check out Giri Mandalika's great post on the results and comparsons to other vendors.
- Our involvement with SugarCRM dates to the beginning of the Open Source revolution. Sun's CMT servers have been a natural fit for their workload that tests hardware platform capability. Our result of 3200 users with the T5440 showed near linear scalability from our previous work on the T5440's younger brother, the T5120 (900 users). Furthermore, this benchmark featured the use of Logical Domains (LDOMs) which I've mentioned on an earlier post concerning the S10 Binary Guarantee Program.
- The SPECjAppserver2004 benchmark stresses both the Java application server and the database. The T5440 turned in the best single application server performance2 for 4 chip systems using Oracle's Weblogic 10.3 and the Oracle Database 11g DB 11.1.0.7.
- Not every ISV has a standard benchmark kit- nor do we have enough equipment or manpower to test them all. Nevertheless, we were able to do some good performance analysis of IBM Websphere & DB2 running on the T5220. In addition, we were able to secure the endorsements of 19 ISVs who were able to see the compelling value of the T5440.
We'll be releasing more great performance results based on the T5440 system in the near future. The price-performance, low energy, low footprint aspects of the system have made it a favorite topic in discussions and project proposals with our ISV partners.
Update! Sun has a page dedicated to benchmark excellence.
Please check out: http://www.sun.com/benchmarks/
1Disclosure Statement for SAP SD benchmark:
Two-tier SAP Standard Sales and Distribution (SD) standard SAP ERP 6.0 (2005) application benchmark: SPARC Enterprise Model T5440 (4-way, 4 processors, 32 cores, 256 threads) 4 x 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus, 128GB memory, 7520 SD Benchmark users, 1.98 sec avg response time, Cert#2008058, Oracle 10g, Solaris 10; SPARC Enterprise Model T5240 (2-way, 2 processors, 16 cores, 128 threads) 2 x 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus, 128GB memory, 4170 SD Benchmark users, 1.97 sec avg response time, Cert#2008021, Oracle 10g, Solaris 10; SPARC Enterprise Model T5120 (1-way, 1 proc, 8 cores, 64 threads) 1 x 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2, 64GB memory, 2175 SD Benchmark users, 1.91 sec avg response time, Cert#2007059, Oracle 10g, Solaris 10; IBM System p 570 (8-way, 8 processors, 16 cores, 32 threads) 8 x 4.7 GHz POWER6+, 128GB memory, 8000 SD Benchmark users, 1.98s avg resp time, Cert#2007039, DB2 9, AIX 5L Version 5.3; IBM System p 570 (4-way, 4 processors, 8 cores, 16 threads) 4 x 4.7 GHz POWER6+, 64GB memory, 4010 SD Benchmark users, 1.96s avg resp time, Cert#2007038, Oracle 10g, AIX 5L Version 5.3; IBM System p 550 (4-way, 4 processors, 8 cores, 16 threads) 4 x 4.2 GHz POWER6+, 64GB memory, 3104 SD Benchmark users, 1.91s avg resp time, Cert#2008002, DB2 9, Redhat Enterprise Linux 5; HP ProLiant DL580 G5 (4-way, 4 processors, 24 cores, 24 threads) 4 x 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon, 64GB memory, 5155 SAP SD Benchmark users, 1.97 sec avg response time, Cert#2008050, SQL Server 2005, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition; HP ProLiant BL680c G5 (4-way, 4 processors, 24 cores, 24 threads) 4 x 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon, 64GB memory, 4432 SAP SD Benchmark users, 1.99 sec avg response time, Cert#2008049, SQL Server 2005, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition; HP ProLiant DL585 G5 (4-way, 4 processors, 16 cores, 16 threads) 4 x 2.5 GHz Quad-Core AMD Opteron, 64GB memory, 3801 SAP SD Benchmark users, 1.99 sec avg response time, Cert#2008041, SQL Server 2005, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition; HP ProLiant BL685c G5 (4-way, 4 processors, 16 cores, 16 threads) 4 x 2.3 GHz Quad-Core AMD Opteron, 64GB memory, 3524 SAP SD Benchmark users, 1.98 sec avg response time, Cert#2008016, SQL Server 2005, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition; HP ProLiant DL385 G5 (2-way, 2 processors, 8 cores, 8 threads) 2 x 2.3 GHz Quad-Core AMD Opteron, 32GB memory, 2102 SAP SD Benchmark users, 1.99 sec avg response time, Cert#2008015, SQL Server 2005, Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition; HP Integrity BL860C (2-way, 2 processors, 4 cores, 8 threads) 2 x 1.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Itanium, 24GB memory, 1165 SAP SD Benchmark users, 1.94 sec avg response time, Cert#2008052, Oracle 10g, HP-UX 11i V3; SAP, R/3, mySAP reg TM of SAP AG in Germany and other countries. More info www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark.
Results Summary
| Certified Results | |||
| Performance: | 7520 benchmark users | ||
| Server: | Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 | ||
| Processors: | 4 x 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus | ||
| Memory: | 128 GB | ||
| Operating system: | Solaris 10 | ||
| Database S/W: | Oracle 10g | ||
| SAP S/W: | SAP ECC 6.0 | ||
| SAP Certification: | 2008058 | ||
| Storage: | 3 x Sun StorageTek(tm) 2510
3 x Sun StorageTek(tm) 2540 2 x Sun StorEdge 6120 |
||
2SPECjAppServer2004
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 (4 chips, 32 cores) 5836.15 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.
Two Dell PowerEdge 2950 (4 chips, 16 cores) 4794.33 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.
Two Dell PowerEdge 1950 (4 chips, 16 cores) 3593.68 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.
SPEC, SPECjAppServer reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.
Results from www.spec.org as of 10/13/08
