University of Wisconsin–Madison

Computer Systems Lab Simplifies IT Management and Administration with Sun Blade 6000 Modular System

Founded in 1848, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has long been recognized as one of America's great public universities. The school's 41,000 students have a diverse range of liberal arts and professional programs to choose from, including agriculture, music, nursing, pharmacology, law, and veterinary medicine, to name a few. The Computer Sciences department is consistently ranked in the top ten in the United States.

Customer Challenges

Needed to replace outmoded legacy servers
Needed a reliable HPC (high-performance computing) solution for compute-intensive simulations
Wanted to simplify server deployment and management

Solution

The University of Wisconsin Computer Systems Lab, which manages hundreds of servers, replaced several legacy 1U white box rackmount servers with high-performance, eco-friendly Sun Blade servers.

Business Results

More than doubled compute power per square foot of datacenter floorspace
Increased compute power per CPU
Increased the performance of computer architecture simulations

Products and Services

Story Details

The Computer Systems Lab at the University of Wisconsin is always looking for ways to simplify its systems. The lab manages more than 400 servers in computer clusters for various research projects across five groups in the Computer Sciences department. One research group that runs thousands of simulations for computer science research highly compute-intensive simulations wanted to step up the performance of its systems. The legacy 1U rackmount servers it was using had limited memory and processing power and were prone to failure.

The research group chose to replace its legacy servers with three Sun Blade 6000 modular systems. Each blade chassis houses ten Sun Blade X6250 server modules, with two Intel Quad Core CPUs and 32 GB memory per blade. The chipsets are Intel 120-watt rather than the typical 80-watt. “These are higher-density, higher- performing chipsets, which offer more compute power per CPU,” says Henning Henningsen, Data Center Specialist for Sun, who assisted with the deployment.

" Everything about the Sun Blade 6000 system was just extremely easy and simpler than any product we've dealt with before. Anything that simplifies our physical management, inventory management, or even debugging and diagnosing node failures is a huge win for us. "

— David Parter, Associate Director Computer Systems Lab, University of Wisconsin-Madison

David Parter, Associate Director of the Computer Systems Lab, was delighted with the research group's choice. “What interested and impressed us about the Sun Blade 6000 System was the compactness in terms of installation and management. A lot of the details were nicely thought through, unlike a lot of products we’ve seen,” says Parter. “With other products, the little details like how they’re cabled, how the power supplies are configured, how you replace a fan or a disk, or how you check the status are just not as well thought through,” says Parter. “Every one of those little annoyances gets multiplied by the number of servers or blades you have.” Those details have a significant impact on time spent installing and maintaining systems. “From a hardware and maintenance perspective, everything about the Sun Blade 6000 system worked the way we wanted it to: fans were easily removable, external cables easy to manage, power supplies easy to manage,” says Parter.

With shared I/O, management, cooling, and power components, the Sun Blade 6000 systems are smaller and more eco-friendly than traditional 1U or 2U rackmount servers. The new blade servers, which replace six or more legacy rackmount servers, provide more than double the processing power per square foot of floorspace. “The Sun Blade 6000 offers a significant amount of computing power in one rack. With our previous generation of servers, it would have taken at least two or three racks,” says Parter. And the servers run significantly cooler, reducing power and cooling costs.

When asked about future plans, Parter says there are four or five other groups within the Computer Sciences department that might make purchasing decisions in the future. “We’re certainly recommending that Sun Blade systems be considered for anyone who’s looking at an installation of this size.”