Sun Demos x64 Servers and Open Storage Performance

Sun Microsystems demonstrated the robust performance, price/performance and density of its Open Network Systems with multiple record-breaking results on industry-standard Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing (BIDW) and e-mail serving benchmarks. These records highlight the significant infrastructure and management cost savings Sun’s Open Network Systems deliver through the convergence of compute, networking and storage. Sun also announced outstanding performance on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark and the SAS Analytics grid test.

The results announced are:

TPC-H@300GB
The Sun Fire X4600 M2 server also delivered a new eight-processor, non-clustered price/performance record on the TPC-H@300GB benchmark, highlighting the data warehousing and decision support system capabilities of the server. The TPC-H benchmark is designed to evaluate the performance of various BIDW and Decision Support Systems (DSS) systems at various database sizes, also referred to as scale factor (SF). Sun’s first TPC-H publication using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 beats the competing HP DL785 server by nearly 15 percent on price/performance and uses 20 percent fewer disks (1).

TPC-H@30000GB
A cluster of 43 Sun Fire X4540 storage servers equipped with AMD Opteron processors running the OpenSolaris operating system (OS) set new performance and price/performance records on the TPC-H benchmark at the 30TB scale factor – the highest scale factor with published results. The Sun Fire X4540 storage servers combined with the ParAccel Analytic Database (PADB), a high-speed, low-effort, massively parallel (MPP) columnar database management system (DBMS) for data warehousing and analytics, was seven times faster and provided 16 times better price/performance than the only other posted result on the HP Superdome (2). Sun’s solution consumed only 1/3 the power in less than 1/6 the floor space of the HP system, while delivering a fully mirrored storage pool with almost 1,000 fewer disks, significantly reducing management costs and complexity (3).

SPECmail2009
The Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage System propelled the Sun Fire X4275 server, powered by two Intel Xeon X5570 processors, to a new world record on SPECmail2009 benchmark, a test designed to simulate real-world corporate e-mail environments and measure a system’s ability to serve e-mail using industry-standard protocols (4). The Sun Fire X4275 server, running Java System Messaging Server 6.4 and the Solaris 10 OS, with two Sun Storage 7110 Unified Storage Systems, supported 1/3 more users using approximately half the number of disk drives, compared to competitive systems using direct attached storage.

SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark
The Sun Fire X4600 M2 server (8 processors/32 cores/32 threads), running AMD Opteron processors, set an eight-processor world record on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark with 6,050 SAP SD Benchmark users running the new SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application (Unicode). The SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments and demonstrates the performance of competitive systems running order and invoice-processing workloads. Running SAP solutions with the MaxDB 7.8 database, the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server surpassed the closest competing eight-processor HP ProLiant DL785 G5 system by 10 percent with 5,518 SAP SD users (5). This result also highlights the optimal performance of SAP ERP on Sun Fire servers running the Solaris Operating System (OS) and the seamless multilingual support available for systems running SAP applications.

SAS Analytics Grid Endurance Test
Sun’s Open Network-based servers and storage are also ideal platforms for enterprise data management. Seven Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers with AMD Opteron processors running the Solaris 10 OS and the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System, delivered the first large scale grid validation of the SAS Grid Computing 9.2 release. SAS Grid Computing enables grid support for analytical data mining and data integration and is designed to automatically enable grid-based execution for certain analytics procedures. These results demonstrate the strengths of the Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System in configuring, analyzing and tuning complex SAS data-intensive multi-node environments while delivering over 900MB/s of application throughput over a single 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) connection.

(1) TPC-H, QphH, $/QphH TM of Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). TPC-H@300GB Sun Fire X4600 M2 (8 processors / 32 cores / 32 threads) 55,158 QphH@300GB, $2.80/QphH@300GB, availability 7/7/09. HP Proliant DL785 (8 processors / 32 cores / 32 threads) 52,860.2 QphH@300GB, $3.71 USD/QphH@300GB, avail 08/30/08

(2) TPC-H@30000GB Sun Fire X4540 1,050,556 QphH@30000GB, $2.86/QphH@30000GB, availability 6/23/09. HP Integrity Superdome, 150,960 QphH @30000GB, $46.69 / QphH @30000GB, availability 06/18/07.

(3) HP Integrity Superdome power rating of 19.5kW is calculated as 80% of maximum input power reported 6/30/09; HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array 1000 power rating of 0.5kW is calculated as 90% of maximum input power reported 6/30/09; Sun Fire X4540 power rating of 1.2kW is a maximum measured power consumption reported 6/30/09.

(4) SPEC and the benchmark name SPECmail are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from this announcement and www.spec.org, as of 07/06/09. SPECmail2009 Sun Fire X4275 (2 sockets, 8 cores, 16 threads, Solaris 10, Sun JMS 6.4): 8000 SPECmail_Ent2009 users; 38,401 SPECmail2009 Sessions/Hour, July 2009. SPECmail2009 Apple Xserve3,1 (2 sockets, 8cores, 16 threads, Mac OS X Server 10.6, Dovecot 1.1.14apple0.5): 6000 SPECmail_Ent2009 users; 28,887 SPECmail2009 Sessions/Hour, May 2009.

(5) Results of the Sun Fire X4600 M2 (8 processors / 32 cores / 32 threads), Solaris 10, Oracle 10g, SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode) results: 6,050 SAP SD Benchmark users; 33,230 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009022. Results of the HP ProLiant DL785 G5 (8 processors / 32 cores / 32 threads), SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode) results: 5,518 SAP SD Benchmark users, 30,180 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009009.

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