We launched a new web portal this week, our own one:
Here a screenshot of the old one:
Great work, thanks to the team!
Monthly Archive for June, 2007
I don’t pimp Pixelpark products much in this blog, but today I’ll do. Over the last years, we used to host Web portals in our datacenter for customer on a Solaris based serverfarm called gridpark. Since 2005 we run Solaris 10 with Solaris zones on Sun Sparc, Sun Coolthreads and AMD Opteron processors, dependent on the solution for the customer. Besides of the main gridpark platform, there are also customers on Linux, Windows 2003 and VMWARE on Dell and IBM Server Hardware. Most of these dedicated solutions are based on standard rackmount servers like Dell 2850, Sun X4100, X4200, X4600, T2000, V240 and so on. We looked at a couple of Blade platforms in the past, but almost all of them had a couple of disadvantages for us. But there’s a new Blade platform now, the Sun Blade 6000 familiy.
Besides the 10 slot chassis, there are are a couple of different server modules available for the Sun Blade 6000 modular system today:
- T6300: 1 socket Sun UltraSparc T1, almost the same as the Sun T2000
- X6220: 2 socket AMD Opteron 2000 Series, dual core, looks like the X4100 with more memory slots
- X6250: 2 socket Intel Clovertown Series, dual and quad core
That means, we have the choice today to decide on which CPU platform to run web portals best. Looking at SPECweb2006 and SPECjAPPServer2004 results to compare this three CPU platforms, you will soon see the winner: The Intel Clovertown series seems to outperform the AMD Opteron 2000 Series and the Sun UltraSparc T1 CPU in these benchmarks. If you look at database performance (mysql and postgresql), tweakers.net published their experience comparing a Sun X4600 8 socket dual core Opteron Server with a Intel Cloverton X5355 2 socket quad core server.
The conclusion of tweakers.net is, that for typical web (2.0) workloads (SPECweb, SPECjbb, small databases) the Intel Clovertown CPUs has a very interesting price/performance ratio.
And what does this mean for project gridpark: It’s a big advantage for us, to have a the possibility to buy the Intel Clovertown based servers from Sun for the Sun Blade 6000 plattform and to have Sun Solaris 10 support as well as already optimized Sun Studio 12 compilers.
Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 Update 1 is released. The main new features are:
- Accelerator Cache
- Performance and stability improvements
- Out-of-box Java support for Servlets 2.5, JSP 2.1, JSF 1.2
- Support for Java SE 5.0 and 6
- Support for NetBeans IDE 5.0, 5.5, and 5.5.1
- Administration interface support for FastCGI
More in the Release Notes, you can download it here.
There are a couple of published results for glassfish V1 aka Sun Java Systems Application Server 9.0 on different types of Server hardware:
- One Sun T2000, One 1,2Ghz T1, 8 Cores: 521,42 JOPS
- Three Sun X4100, each two 2,6Ghz AMD Opteron, 4Cores: 720,56 JOPS
compared to Bea Weblogic 9.0:
- One Sun T2000, One 1,2Ghz T1, 8 Cores: 615,64 JOPS
Looking forward to see Glassfish V2 SPECjAPPServer2004 benchmarks for Servers with AMD Opteron, Intel Woodcrest Clovertown and Niagara2 …
A very nice feature offered by Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall is the Thunderbird plugin to classify mails as spam within Thunderbird. But after upgrading Thunderbird to 2.0.0.4, the plugin stops working. Barracuda Networks Support answer to this : Unfortunately we do not have a new version of the Thunderbird plugin and we currently do not have an ETA on when a new plugin will be available. I apologize for this inconvenience.
One solution might be to build as custom Thunderbird filter, mentioned here.
OpenCms 7, a great Open Source CMS seems not to work on glassfish 2. We tried OpenCMS 6 last year with glassfish 1 and we had no problems, but didn’t go into production with this setting.
Solaris Express Developer Edition 5/07 is available now, and there are a lot of new features and packages within this distribution.
A couple of the interesting ones:
- Glassfish Application Server (have to check the version)
- Sun Studio 12
- PostgreSQL 8.2.4
- Apache 2.2.3 (have to check if mod_ldap is already compiled…)
- and many more…
Full detailed what’s new pdf.
Hope to have these packages with Solaris 10 for production, soon. With Solaris 10, we’ re still on apache 2.0.x..
Tomcat and mysql bundled with Solaris 10 are also quite a bit too old for web2.0 projects, which we have in production today.
Currenty, I don’t findy any VMware images to download, only the usual setup DVD download.
not too small, these Sun Fire X4600 M2 Servers with up to eight Quad Core AMD Barcelona Opterons.
Morgen und nächste Woche findet Ihr mich hier.
