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Full pricing of the HP SPECjAppServer2004 874.17 JOPS@Standard Submission

As you will see from my other blog entries on the subject of SPECjAppServer2004 there is a part of the submission which is called the bill of materials (BOM). This is included in all of the published results so that users/customers or others can see exactly what components are required to enable the benchmark score to be achieved. The BOM includes all part numbers or names for the tested components and hence allows end users to do pricing of the submission. Depending on the vendor this pricing will be either a straight forward exercise or will take a little work. At Sun it appears that we are happy to publish all of our prices at http://www.sun.com but this isn't always the case with all vendors, however as you can see below using the BOM and the part numbers in the BOM you can get a pretty good idea of the full price of the submission even if the vendor isn't actively publishing all prices on their web site or in their performance claims. So the BOM is a great tool to keep the claims that vendors make regarding their benchmark results more honest, complete, accurate and relevant to your business.

I noticed the price/performance claims HP is making in recent posts and documents about their integrity servers, certainly the pricing information at the bottom of page 2 in this document seems a little incomplete. So I have used the BOM from the HP SPECjAppServer2004 result to give a “more complete” picture of the price of the HP benchmarked system.

Methodology

I have used the HP web site as the primary source for HP hardware prices and a TPC-C result from HP to price the operating system and several other components also being used on the SPEC submission. For some components where the price is not listed by HP I have found 3^rd party suppliers and included these prices, generally 3^rd party suppliers are cheaper than the original equipment manufacturer so that using these 3^rd party prices is very likely to yield a lower overall system price.

Conclusions/Observations

1. The full price of the HP 874 JOPS result is $US 187,701.52
   The price performance therefore on this submission is 187701.52/874.17 = $US 214.72/JOPS

2. HP is not leading price performance because Sun's has (far) superior price/performance proof points such as the recent submission with Sun Application Server Glassfish and MySQL 5 on Solaris 10. The result is 720 SPECjAppServer2004JOPS@Standard* and the price performance is $US 82.24/JOPS. All the pricing details for this result can be found on this blog at http://blogs.sun.com/tomdaly/date/20070618
   
   
   

*Footnote

The HP result can be found at http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/res2007q2/jAppServer2004-20070410-00060.html
The referenced Sun result can be found at http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/res2007q2/jAppServer2004-20070411-00063.html

Posted at 11:25PM Jun 18, 2007 by tomdaly in Java Databases and Performance  | 

Pricing for Latest Sun Glassfish/MySQL/Solaris SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark

720 JOPS pricing

Some while ago a technical hitch was noted on the Sun/Glassfish/MySQL result referenced here, the hitch was a small configuration error which mean't that the result didn't follow the SPECjAppServer run rules to the letter and so the result was removed from the SPEC web site (marked non compliant). Sun is committed to using and improving open source software and so with help from MySQL we resubmitted and republished this benchmark at SPEC. The updated result uses almost the same configuration as the initial result the signifcant changes were to use a StorageTek 3510 disk array and to use an updated release of the Sun 9.0 application server (Glassfish). You can find the new an improved result of 720.56 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard at http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/res2007q2/jAppServer2004-20070411-00063.html

Summary of price/performance

So using the bill of materials (BOM) from the submission the price of the entire hardware and software stack is $US 59,260 (see below for calculations)
The price performance of this result is 59,260/720.56 or $US 82.24/JOPS

Please notice that the price analysis includes all of the major components hardware and software listed in the BOM.

I believe that this result demonstrates the leading price/performance for this benchmark (by a long way).

A couple of important notes / disclaimers :

• The SunFire X4100 servers used in the submission are now older models, the current and (very similar) model is the SunFire X4100 part number A86-FGZ2BH4GKBA listed under “Config 3-M2” for which the price is listed at $US 5945.00 at the Sun shop

• The prices below are in $US

• All prices for Sun products below come from the Sun web site http://www.sun.com and hence the web site is the correct place to make purchasing enquiries or to check on my calculations

• The prices are listed here for illustrative purposes only and are from the web site as at June 2007

• I haven't included support in this calculation it looks at acquisition cost only

• I haven't included the price of the screen and keyboard as this is a cost common to all submissions and only a minor amount

Supplier  Description                                Product #            Qty     Unit Price      Price
--------  ----------------------------------------   ------------------   ---     ----------      -------
Sun       Sun Fire X4100 (2x285,4x2GB,2X73GB)        A64-EGB2-2H-8G-CB7    3      $8995           $26,985
Sun       Solaris 10 RTU                                                   3      $0              $0
Sun       SunSpectrum Upgrade: 3YGOLD, 24x7          W9D-A64-24-3G         3      not priced      not priced 

Sun       Sun Fire X4100 (2x285,4x2GB,2X73GB)        A64-EGB2-2H-8G-CB7    1      $8995           $8995
Sun       Solaris 10 RTU                                                   1      $0              $0
Sun       Single-Port PCI Ultra320 SCSI HBA          SGXPCI1SCSILM320-Z    1      $340            $340      
Sun       SunSpectrum Upgrade: 3YGOLD, 24x7          W9D-A64-24-3G         1      not priced      not priced

Sun       Sun StorEdge 3320, 12x73GB, 1 RAID CONT    XTA3510R01A1R876      1      $22,495         $22,495
Sun	  Single-Port PCI Ultra320 SCSI HBA	     SGXPCI1SCSILM320-Z    1      $445            $445
Sun       SunSpectum Upgrade: 3Y GOLD, 24x7          W9D-SE3510-24-3G      1      not priced      not priced
Sun       17" Entry Color Monitor                    X7147A                1
Sun       PS/2 Keyboard & Mouse                      #320-1261             1

Sun       Sun Java System Application Server                                      $0              $0
          Platform Edition 9.0 

Sun       Sun Java System Application Server         SJSAS-PE9F-1PR        9      not priced      not priced
            Platform Edition 9.0  
            Premium Support per CPU for 1 year

MySQL     MySQL Database 5.0                                                      $0              $0
MySQL     MySQL Network Gold Support                                       3      not priced      not priced 
            for 1 year
                                                                                                  ==========
                                                                                                  $59,260
                                                                                                  ==========

Required Disclosure Statement:

• SPECjAppServer2004 3x Sun Fire X4100 appservers (12 cores, 6 chips) and 1 Sun Fire X4100 database (4 cores, 2 chips) 720.56 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.

Posted at 10:51PM Jun 18, 2007 by tomdaly in Java Databases and Performance  |