What's all the noise about UltraSPARC T2 servers?

Tuesday Oct 09, 2007

I posted my previous blog entry when we introduced UltraSPARC T1 based systems. I guess it is time to do another blog now that we are introducing the next gen server.

We just launched UltraSPARC T2 servers (what we call as Niagara 2 servers internally). We have been working on it for 4 years or so and our intention was to integrate as many server capabilities on the chip and also to deliver systems with industry leading power/performance, price/performance & highly optimized for virtualization. We ended up delivering what we were aiming for and more. As you know, as an idea moves thru various phases and gets converted into a product, features get dropped along the way due to cost and / or time pressures. Not so for this baby!

We integrated 10GbE, crypto & PCI functionality on the chip. You may wonder how that helps datacenters. By integrating crypto functionality in the chip, we are able to process a HUGE amount of data at a fraction of compute costs without the need for add-on cards. Now, customers can secure their transactions and data at no cost. The 10GbE gives you terrific near line speed network bandwidth at a very low processing cost. All this means, you need less additional components (which implies better system reliability and availability). And, Solaris along with Sun xVM (virtualization) comes bundled in at no additional cost. This lower acquisition cost and cost of ownership for our customers. Did I mention that all the key pieces of the stack including UltraSPARC T2 processor are open sourced?

My team has been working on further enhancing the performance & scalability of this system and the benchmark results from bmseer as well as early access customer experiences indicate that we have a product which is setting new standards. This is what servers ought to look like. You bet it's worth making noise about!

When we introduced UltraSPARC T1, we had a lot of customers asking us if that system was suitable for running databases. They experimented with it and found out that they can get great database performance on that platform. With UltraSPARC T2 based systems, we have seen in excess of 2x transaction throughput running OLTP apps with databases like Oracle. And, we got that throughput with no special tuning. These apps actually scaled well as we enabled more cores on US T2. Even single threaded apps get a performance boost of around 25% going to US T2 systems.

BTW, for more info, please check Allan Packer's CMT Comes Of Age blog.

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Posted at 02:35PM Oct 09, 2007 by rganesh in Sun
Tags: cmt niagara oltp oracle performance t2 t5120 t5220 t5x20 ultrasparc