RAS in the T5140 and T5240
Wednesday Apr 09, 2008
Today, Sun introduced two new CMT servers, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers.
I'm really excited about this next stage of server development. Not only have we effectively doubled the performance capacity of the system, we did so without significantly decreasing the reliability. When we try to predict reliability of products which are being designed, we make those predictions based on previous generation systems. At Sun, we make these predictions at the component level. Over the years we have collected detailed failure rate data for a large variety of electronic components as used in the environments often found at our customer sites. We use these component failure rates to determine the failure rate of collections of components. For example, a motherboard may have more than 2,000 components: capacitors, resistors, integrated circuits, etc. The key to improving motherboard reliability is, quite simply, to reduce the number of components. There is some practical limit, though, because we could remove many of the capacitors, but that would compromise signal integrity and performance -- not a good trade-off. The big difference in the open source UltraSPARC T2 and UltraSPARC T2plus processors is the high level of integration onto the chip. They really are systems on a chip, which means that we need very few additional components to complete a server design. Fewer components means better reliability, a win-win situation. On average, the T5140 and T5240 only add about 12% more components over the T5120 and T5220 designs. But considering that you get two or four times as many disks, twice as many DIMM slots, and twice the computing power, this is a very reasonable trade-off.
Let's take a look at the system block diagram to see where all of the major components live.
You will notice that the two PCI-e switches are peers and not cascaded. This allows good flexibility and fault isolation. Compared to the cascaded switches in the T5120 and T5220 servers, this is a simpler design. Simple is good for RAS.
You will also notice that we use the same LSI1068E SAS/SATA controller with onboard RAID. The T5140 is limited to 4 disk bays, but the T5240 can accommodate 16 disk bays. This gives plenty of disk targets for implementing a number of different RAID schemes. I recommend at least some redundancy, dual parity if possible.
Some people have commented that the Neptune Ethernet chip, which provides dual-10Gb Ethernet or quad-1Gb Ethernet interfaces is a single point of failure. There is also one quad GbE PHY chip. The reason the Neptune is there to begin with is because when we implemented the coherency links in the UltraSPARC T2plus processor we had to sacrifice the builtin Neptune interface which is available in the UltraSPARC T2 processor. Moore's Law assures us that this is a somewhat temporary condition and soon we'll be able to cram even more transistors onto a chip. This is a case where high integration is apparent in the packaging. Even though all four GbE ports connect to a single package, the electronics inside the package are still isolated. In other words, we don't consider the PHY to be a single point of failure because the failure modes do not cross the isolation boundaries. Of course, if your Ethernet gets struck by lightning, there may be a lot of damage to the server, so there is always the possibility that a single event will create massive damage. But for the more common cabling problems, the system offers suitable isolation. If you are really paranoid about this, then you can purchase a PCI-e card version of the Neptune and put it in PCI-e slot 1, 2, or 3 to ensure that it uses the other PCI-e switch.
The ILOM service processor is the same as we use in most of our other small servers and has been a very reliable part of our systems. It is connected to the rest of the system through a FPGA which manages all of the service bus connections. This allows the service processor to be the serviceability interface for the entire server.
The server also uses ECC FB-DIMMs with Extended ECC, which is another common theme in Sun servers. We have recently been studying the affects of Solaris Fault Management Architecture and Extended ECC on systems in the field and I am happy to report that this combination provides much better system resiliency than possible through the individual features. In RAS, the whole can be much better than the sum of the parts.
For more information on the RAS features of the new T5140 and T5240 servers, see the white paper, Maximizing IT Service Uptime by Utilizing Dependable Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 Servers. The whitepaper has results of our RAS benchmarks as well as some performability calculations.
|
|
|
|
Tags: availability cmt eco fma opensolaris opensparc raid ras reliability server serviceability solaris t2 t2plus ultrasparc
