Wednesday August 08, 2007

With its 64 threads, the UltraSPARC T2 processor can handle big consolidation workloads. But it is fair to ask whether you should be comfortable putting more eggs (applications) into that bigger basket. We think you should be, in part because of all the work we've done around Fault Management for T2 platforms.

Scott Davenport has led the team that designed and developed the FMA implementation for T2 systems. He has an excellent blog entry that describes exactly what the team has done to diagnose CPU, memory, IO, crypto, and networking issues. Definitely worth a read.

I mentioned in my last blog entry that our new UltraSPARC T2 processor (code name Niagara 2) would make a nice consolidation platform with its 64 threads and with Sun's SPARC virtualization product (LDOMs) that allows multiple OS instances (Solaris or Linux) to be run simultaneously on a single system.

Lest you dismiss this as random bluster, check out Ash's blog and watch his flash demo. Picture a roughly pizza-box sized computer running 64 separate operating systems.

Pretty slick!