Tag Archive for 'T2000'

Web 2.0 Hosting on Sun Blade 6000

Published on June 24, 2007 in Berlin, Sun Solaris, misc and pixelpark. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

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.

Sun Blade 6000

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.

SPECjAPPServer2004 results for glassfish

Published on June 19, 2007 in Sun Solaris and glassfish. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

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:

Looking forward to see Glassfish V2 SPECjAPPServer2004 benchmarks for Servers with AMD Opteron, Intel Woodcrest Clovertown and Niagara2 …

Tuning Sun Fire T2000

Published on September 11, 2006 in Sun Solaris. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

Running Solaris 10 and Applications on Sun T2000 and T1000 Niagara Servers today requires some manual configurations to achive maximum performance.

At first, you should install the latest Solaris 10 version, this is currently the Solaris 10 8/07 Release.

Check your /etc/system File on your Server for the following entries (Up to Solaris 10, 6/06):

set segkmem_lpsize=0×400000
set pcie:pcie_aer_ce_mask=0×1
set ip:ip_squeue_bind = 0
set ip:ip_squeue_fanout = 1
set ipge:ipge_tx_syncq=1
set ipge:ipge_taskq_disable = 0
set ipge:ipge_tx_ring_size = 2048
set ipge:ipge_srv_fifo_depth = 2048
set ipge:ipge_bcopy_thresh = 512
set ipge:ipge_dvma_thresh = 1
set segkmem_lpsize=0×400000
set consistent_coloring=2
set pcie:pcie_aer_ce_mask=0×1

Apache 2.0 / 2.2 on Sun Fire T2000 and T1000
A good application to run on Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 servers is apache. If you run applications with SSL, you can use 8 on-chip Modular Arithmetic Units (MAU),
one per core inside the UltraSPARC T1 processor. These 8 MAUs extends the processor’s capabilities to act as Hardware Cryptographic SSL Accelerators.

Using the Solaris 10 Cryptographic Framework, it combines thepower of these 8 MAUs, and offers a device (NCP) that can do 14000 raw RSA ops/sec.
You can use the Hardware SSL Accelerator with openssl provided by Solaris 10 in /usr/sfw/bin/openssl and within apache.

There’s a new Sun Blueprint available, which explains how to use the Sun UltraSparc T1 modular aritmic units (MAUs) for hardware SSL acceleration. Ther are examples for Apache, Sun Java System Web Server, Java Applications and the solaris Kernel SSL Proxy (KSSL).

Oracle 10g Database on Sun Fire T2000 and T1000

There’s a whitepaper about running Oracle 10gR2 Database on a Sun T2000 Niagara Server. Summary: When running the Oracle database 10g, the Sun Fire T2000 CoolThreads server outperformed an equivalent 4-way Dell PowerEdge server equipped with the latest 64 bit Intel Xeon processors by over 3.5x, while consuming 1.6x less power and occupying 50% of the data center space. It was able to do this while achieving a 3x better price / performance ratio.

MySQL Database on Sun Fire T2000 and T1000

Choose at least MySQL Version 5.x. MySQL 4.x doesn’t scale very good because of locking problems inside MySQL 4.1.

This blog entry is a good starting Point: MySQL InnoDB performance tuning on T2000.

The following articles about mysql on Niagara Servers, are more benchmarks than recommendations. You should have a look at one document from DigiTar and this from zilbo.com.
If you want to read about compiling mysql for Solaris you can look for this Arcticle on SDN. Not only for T2000, also for Solaris 10 on sparc and opteron.

IBM DB2 UDB Database on Sun Fire T2000 and T1000

An arcticle called optimizing IBM DB2 for Solaris 10 1/06 OS on Sun Fire T2000 Server on SDN is what you should read.

Oracle 10g on Sun Fire T2000

Published on July 26, 2006 in Sun Solaris. 10 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

There’s a new whitepaper about running Oracle 10gR2 Database on a Sun T2000 Niagara Server. Summary: When running the Oracle database 10g, the Sun Fire T2000 CoolThreads server outperformed an equivalent 4-way Dell PowerEdge server equipped with the latest 64 bit Intel Xeon processors by over 3.5x, while consuming 1.6x less power and occupying 50% of the data center space. It was able to do this while achieving a 3x better price / performance ratio.

Coolthreads

Published on July 19, 2006 in Peering, Sun Solaris and pixelpark. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Today, we installed a couple of new Sun Server in one of our datacenters. On the picture, you can see one Sun T2000 and three Sun X4200.

Sun T2000 X4200

systemhelden

Published on June 16, 2006 in Sun Solaris. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Ein nettes kleines Community Portal von Sun Deutschland mit dem Titel Systemhelden habe ich heute entdeckt. Mal gespannt wie sich das entwickelt.

systemhelden.gif

Sun Server Power Calculators online

Published on April 26, 2006 in Sun Solaris. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

For a lot of Servers, Sun offers new Power Calculators online.

Really good to calculate the total system Power in Watts and the BTU/Hour for individual Server configurations. The new calculators are available for SPARC and AMD Opteron Servers:

Sun Java System Web Server

Published on April 7, 2006 in Sun Solaris. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

There are not so many articles on the web about running Sun Java System Web Server instead of apache or tomcat. The Sun Java System Web Server is not only a Web Server, it also includes a servlet container. There are also a lot of NSAPI modules available to integrate with other Application Servers like BEA Weblogic, Vignette V/7 etc.. Maybe the PHP integration, which I never tested in a project might not be so good. There’s a free PHP Enabler for the Sun Java System Web Server from Zend, but since a long time, it’s still Version 1.0… For those who want to run their Applications like Java Web Services based on Axis or the Roller open source blog server Blog Software on Sun Java System Web Server, this arcticle might be a good starting point. From my experience, Sun Java System Web Server is a really good and stable product, and I’m looking forward to see Version 7.0 which will support Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) within Secure Socket Layer and Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS). For all friends of our ne Sun Niagara T2000 Server, the on chip hardware SSL Accelerator is supported by the Web Server.

Sun Niagara T2000 apache benchmark

Published on March 27, 2006 in Sun Solaris. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

If your’ re thinking about running the Sun Fire T2000 Server (Pictures) as Web Server with apache, you might be interested in reading the article Niagara vs ftp.heanet.ie Showdown written by Colm MacCárthaigh.

Sun Niagara T2000 SSL Accelerator

Published on March 21, 2006 in Sun Solaris. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

There’s a new Sun Blueprint available, which explains how to use the Sun UltraSparc T1 modular aritmic units (MAUs) for hardware SSL acceleration. Ther are examples for Apache, Sun Java System Web Server, Java Applications and the Sun Solaris Kernel SSL Proxy (KSSL).

Really interessting are also the benchmarks for RSA Performance, SPECweb99_SSL and SPECweb2005.