Sun Rise Over Nehalem
Tuesday Apr 14, 2009
It is with great pride and pleasure that I am introducing all these fantastic bloggers and their blogs on what has to be a momentous day for Sun. For more than 25 years Sun has solved customer problems through innovation and open systems and I am sure we will continue to do so in the future.
Today however, we take a pause and show to the world our leadership in open network systems design and innovation to maximize the economics of computing with breakthrough application performance,scale, simplicity and cost-efficiency. All this is possible only through Sun's ever pervasive mantra called Innovation - Innovations in servers, networking, storage, software, systems management and their open interactions.
My colleagues have done quite a bit of writing (apart from designing and delivering them of course !) to highlight some of these innovations. Below I introduce the bloggers and their blogs. I have organized them under relevant headings that hopefully are self-explanatory. So begin exploring !
Compute - new blades and servers based on the Intel Nehalem processors (Intel Xeon processor 5500 series)
Sun Blade X6270 server module The leading blade platform for virtualization with the most capacity.
Joe Ervin and Marshall Choy provide an excellent product overview in video: New x64 Virtualization Optimized Blade and Rack Servers
See how you can scale your application on the new Sun Blade X6270 with two blogs: Ramin Moazeni's blog titled Oracle Weblogic Application Server 10.3 on Sun Blade x6270 . And Dileep Kumar's blog titled Scaling up WebSphere on Sun Blade X6270 Server.
Or you may be interested in how to get a performance jump on Sun Blade X6270 with IBM DB2 by Cherry Shu.
Benoit describes how one can create an ultimate Directory Server environment with OpenSolaris on the Sun Blade X6270.
You will find Younseo Roh very happy and excited to see the outstanding results by running LS-DYNA on Sun Blade X6270.
Sun Blade X6275 dual-node server module - The industry's fastest blade server and the first blade server to support on-board quad data rate (QDR) InfiniBand for extreme performance and power efficiency for HPC applications.
Josh Simons describes how and the end-user benefits of all this with a colorful title - You Say Nehalem, I Say Nehali.
Sun Fire X2270 - A unique cost-optimized rackmount server with industry's first flash-enabled system from a tier one vendor.
Paul Joyce and Marshall Choy provide a product over view in their video blog: Sun's x64 Open Networking Systems for Web Infrastructure
And you can see the results of the product innovation in the benchmark results.
See how the X2270 scales in Richard Smith's Scaling Olio Web Tier on Sun Fire X2270 Nehalem-based servers
Shanti Subramanyan blogs about Web2.0 Deployment Blueprints
Sun Fire X4170, X4270, X4275 (Lynx family) - The industry's Leading Virtualization Rackmount Servers.
Sun Fire X4170 server - Delivers performance of a 4U system in a compact 1U form factor with savings in space, power and cooling at half the price of competing systems. The results speak for themselves.
Sun Fire X4270 server - The best value for consolidation and virtualization in a dense 2RU form factor for branch office and departmental settings as well as for horizontally scaled data center consolidation needs. Don't take my word for it. See for yourself some of the benchmark results.
Sun Fire X4275 server - The best value for a rich media server with significant savings in $/stream at less than $1/GB for storage as well as savings in energy and space. And this system has record benchmark to go with it.
Joe Ervin and Marshall Choy provide an excellent product overview on the Lynx family of servers in the video: New x64 Virtualization Optimized Blade and Rack Servers
Check out what makes the Lynx family so versatile and "consolidation-capable" with three ISV integration results:
These three servers are also an excellent choice to run MySQL. Neelakanth Nadgir shows how in his blog on MySQL scaling.
Come examine crypto performance on the Sun Fire X4170 with Amitabha Banerjee in this blog.
Ultra 27 with unmatched visualization performance
Networking - Sun Network Express Module (NEM) Technology for Sun Blade Modular Systems and Servers - A new family of blades and server networking solutions that helps dramatically reduce cost and complexity and simplifies large scale blade server deployment into existing network fabric.
Sun Blade 6000 Virtual I/O Network Express Module (NEM): Providing 10GE switching solution at the 1GE price point. A high performance 10 GbE, zero management NEM that delivers unprecedented price/performance and power savings. Delivers 10:1 reduced cabling and takes complexity out of the network infrastructure by eliminating a full switching layer.
Marc Hamilton writes on why this so compelling for our customers in his blog - Sun's New Virtual NEM Makes Blade Networking and I/O Easy and Affordable.
Sun Blade 6048 Quad Data Rate InfiniBand (IB) NEM: Industry leading solution for highly intense workloads with low latency and high throughput I/O requirements. Designed for the highly scalable Sun Blade 6048 Modular System, it can easily scale up from a single chassis to compute clusters greater than 5000 nodes.
Subban Raghunathan describes this in his product overview video blog.
Sun Quad Data Rate IB and Host Channel Adaptors (QDR HCA) extends QDR functionality to blade and rack server compute nodes to provide ultimate price/performance.
Want to know how the Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet scales with load. Pure See talks about network performance on the Nehalem servers
Solaris - Although these new offerings support all industry leading Operating System technologies including Solaris, Windows and Linux, only Solaris truly unlocks the some of the unique capabilities of Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series on these new servers. Find out how:
Jim Grisanzio's blog - Solaris Fast on the New Intel Xeon 5500
Eric Saxe's blog - Power Optimized Thread Placement
Scott Davenport 1st of two FMA blogs - Solaris Fault Management Architecture (FMA) for Nehalem
Scott Davenport 2nd of two FMA blogs - Fault Management on Sun's Xeon 5500-based Systems
Systems Management - Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) to simplify management across server and seamless integration into 3rd party systems management software. Check them out here.
Intel's Nehalem - If you want to know more about the Nehalem, I am sure you can find a lot on the web. But here are some unique perspectives from Sun engineers:
The new memory architecture (integrated memory controller) and new memory technology (DDR3) makes for some interesting choices when it comes to the optimal memory configuration for your needs. John Nerl reveals this in his blog
For a side-by-side feature comparison of the new blades and servers check out my other blog
Chhandomay and Dimitrios have a chat about this announcement on blog talk radio.
Does the Ultra 27 have anyone in its corner? ...