Consolidating the Datacenter
New CoolThreads servers deliver the power of 64 systems — in a single system
 Academic institutions around the world are struggling to build IT infrastructures to serve rapidly growing student populations and communities. Worldwide enrollment in higher education is growing between 10 and 15 percent per year 1; some universities now have enrollments in the hundreds of thousands.
At the same time, more academic and administrative systems are going online and pressuring the IT infrastructure to be always on, 24x7. Yet IT administrators are also under pressure to meet tight budgets, even as costs for IT services increase.
Virtualization has emerged as a compelling technology for campus IT managers tasked with consolidating datacenter environments and reducing costs. Virtualization allows you to consolidate multiple environments onto a much lower number of physical servers, which translates into greater manageability, better use of resources, and tremendous savings — often millions of dollars per year.
New Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers and the Sun Blade T6320 server give you the flexibility and power of 64 virtual systems in a single server — that's up to 2500 systems in a rack — and can help you save up to $1 million in energy costs.
Based on Sun's new multithreaded UltraSPARC T2 processor, these CoolThreads servers are designed to meet the top needs of campus CIOs — to conserve funds, scale services to students and related communities, and run more cost-efficient datacenters.
Designed for Virtualization
Today's campus CIOs need to consolidate underutilized, sprawling server infrastructures with an open, no-cost virtualization solution that enhances business agility, improves disaster recovery, and reduces operating costs. They also need to reduce datacenter complexity by deploying fewer, standard platforms. Improving the uptime and reliability of both the datacenter and its servers is also paramount.
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Sun's next generation CoolThreads servers and blades are designed for virtualization, and deliver the flexibility and power of 64 individual systems on a single server or blade.
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Sun's next generation CoolThreads servers and blades are designed for virtualization, and deliver the flexibility and power of 64 individual systems on a single server or blade. By using the 64-thread UltraSPARC T2 processor, these systems can meet the steepest peaks in demand.
For example, one Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 or T5220 server or Sun Blade T6320 server delivers the performance and compute capacity of eight IBM x346 servers. The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120/T5220 server delivers same performance as an IBM p6 570 at half the price and one-fourth the space.
Virtualization capabilities built into Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers and the Sun Blade T6320 server — and the Solaris 10 Operating System — make these the most flexible, cost-effective servers for maximizing system utilization, with utilization levels as high as 85 percent. These capabilities include:
- Logical Domains (LDoms) is new hardware-enabled server virtualization and partitioning technology from Sun that integrates multithreading capability of the UltraSPARC T1 and UltraSPARC T2 processors and the Solaris 10 OS, letting you run multiple operating systems simultaneously while maintaining isolation and security between each. LDoms is available at no extra charge and can save you up to $9,000 per system compared to proprietary alternatives.
- Solaris Containers, included in the Solaris 10 OS at no additional cost, can virtualize and consolidate hundreds of applications on a single system, delivering savings in energy and space and a huge reduction of complexity.
- The Solaris 10 OS is the industry's first and most secure OS for virtualization across the enterprise.
Energy-Efficient Features
Energy costs are consuming a larger portion of the campus IT budget. Campus IT managers are striving to reduce energy costs and meet social responsibility goals by improving performance for each watt of power the datacenter consumes.
New Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers and the Sun Blade T6320 server reduce demand for datacenter real estate by a creating highly dense compute infrastructure and avoiding "hot spots" common with blade solutions. As a result, they deliver unmatched energy efficiency compared with competitive systems, including:
- Eight times the Web-scale performance of competitive systems
- Over two times the performance per watt of a dual-processor IBM POWER6 server in one-fourth the space, delivering nine times higher data center efficiency
- Extreme reliability through an integrated and simplified design that has resulted in these systems having the fewest parts of any system in their class
For example, by using a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server, you can consolidate eight 2-year-old IBM x346 servers, each configured with dual 3.8GHz Xeon processors, and achieve an eight-fold savings in space and power. Consolidating 160 x346 servers to 20 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 systems can save you $3.7 million in power and over 920 tons of CO2 emissions over three years.
The Sun Blade T6320 server delivers additional power and cooling efficiency in large configurations. Thanks to centralized power and cooling, blade servers can reduce energy usage by up to 15 percent. For example, a Sun Blade T6320 server could replace a 3-year-old HP rp4440 4RU server in one-fourth the space with one-third the power consumption.
UltraSPARC T2 Microprocessor at the Heart of Sun's New Servers
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers and the Sun Blade T6320 server are based on the new UltraSPARC T2 processor, the fastest, most energy-efficient microprocessor on the market. With eight cores and 64 threads, the UltraSPARC T2 processor (also known as Niagara 2) delivers more throughput, performance, and functionality per watt than any chip in its class.
"We're at a historic point in computing, moving away from sequential processing to multicore designs," said Professor Dave Patterson, Pardee Chair of Computer Science for the University of California at Berkeley. "Hence, we need to invent new ways to evaluate these new parallel systems. Our initial experiments suggest that Niagara 2 has the highest performance, is the most power efficient, and is the most 'software friendly' of the processors we've tested."
Like its predecessor, the UltraSPARC T1 processor in T1000 and T2000 CoolThreads servers, UltraSPARC T2 extends Sun's lead in eco performance and "green computing" by consuming fewer than 2 watts per thread — in other words, one-tenth to one-thirtieth the power consumption of competitive offerings.
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Bottom line: Sun's multithreaded processing technology has the potential to save campus IT millions of dollars in skyrocketing power, cooling, and space expenses.
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A "System on a Chip," Ideal for Virtualization
The UltraSPARC T2 processor is called a "system on a chip" because it combines essential functions on a single piece of silicon, including multithreaded 10 GbE networking, security, and I/O. Importantly for campus IT administrators, the processor is engineered for consolidation and virtualization, with support for up to 64 domains on a single chip and the Containers and LDoms virtualization technology included in the Solaris 10 OS.
UltraSPARC T2 also excels at such diverse workloads and applications as enterprise-grade Java technology, database and mail servers, ERP and HPC applications, networking, and storage. Bottom line: Sun's multithreaded processing technology has the potential to save campus IT millions of dollars in skyrocketing power, cooling, and space expenses.
Take a Look Inside UltraSPARC T2 Technology
Having surpassed 6000 downloads of OpenSPARC T1 source code, Sun is working to release source code for the UltraSPARC T2 processor to the OpenSPARC community at www.opensparc.net. Sun is giving developers a first look at the inner workings of the processor by releasing the OpenSPARC T2 Technology Programmer Reference Manual and the OpenSPARC T2 Technology Microarchitecture Specification through the GPL, and launching an NDA Developer Beta program. Developers will find all of these at www.opensparc.net.
In support of this effort, several leading U.S. universities have opened OpenSPARC Centers of Excellence (COEs) to establish collaborative relationships between Sun and faculty within the OpenSPARC community. These COEs include the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Michigan.
Questions or comments? Please email education_news@sun.com
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