Wednesday April 16, 2008

Sunray Server strategy shift

Chris and myself have described our high regard for the SunRay technology and how we use it in the office and at home. We have a Solaris10 'FCS' server which runs the latest Solaris10 update release. This is for our users who do not want to be on the bleeding edge. This is still a E4900 with two system boards and a total 128GB of memory. We then had another E4900 with the very latest Ultrasparc processors from the lab pool keeping them warm until they are needed for customer support. This platform was divided into two domains. These two domains would be upgraded in turn to new builds of what we call Solaris Nevada. This exposes us to the latest technology and fixes that I believe always go into Nevada first before going back into say the Solaris 10 patch or feature gates. Anyway this was all good until someone said why not have a x86 box? So we put in a well configured V40Z. This extends the time between upgrades of each of the servers (six weeks) and is good as it means the server runs longer hopefully finding memory leak problems or other issues that are only found when systems run for longer periods of time.

What we are not expecting to find was an Xsun bug you would only see on x86 platforms.

When we announced the first Niagara2 machines we felt duty bound to give one a go and within hours of running one we had a really interesting bug Tim looked at that and again you would only see in Nevada and on the Niagara2 platform. Within a few weeks we then had another bug this time you would only see on the latest Ultrasparc IV+ processors again on Nevada. We have also found and logged several application bugs and some relating to the Gnome desktop. The oddest one I logged was BugID 6564048 with the title of Nevada lp prints non-existent files! So given all this tangible benefits of running these platforms we have decided to keep:

Sunfire V890 Server replacing the E4900 - this is a smaller size box - with the latest Ultrasparc IV+ that you can get for this box.

Sunfire T5220 server eight cores, 64GB memory.

And the Sunfire V40Z server.

Should be interesting...