UltraSPARC T1-Based Servers
Dieter an Mey, Director of High Performance Computing
The RWTH (Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule) Aachen, also known as the Aachen University of Technology, is one of Europe's top technical institutions for research and higher learning. Over 29,000 students pursue studies in engineering, chemistry, physics, medicine, and other fields, where applications such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tax the power of the highest performance computers the industry is able to produce. One of the largest supercomputers in the world is housed there, powered by Sun Microsystems technology. The university was curious about how the new Sun Fire T2000 might fit into this kind of environment, and decided to test one in their HPC lab.
"The employment of new types of micro-processors with chip multi-processing (CMP) and chip multi-threading (CMT) technologies which will most likely dominate the market of HPC systems in the future. For sure, future multi-threading processors will be capable of executing floating point operations at the same rate as the T1 processors executes integer operations today, which the Sun Fire T2000 did well in our tests. We look to Sun to provide these kinds of advanced technologies to help guide us into the future." – Dieter an Mey, HPC Team Lead, RWTH Aachen University
Paul Blackman, IT infrastructure manager, Australian Finance Group
"We were especially blown away with the performance of the Sun Fire T2000 servers and the cost savings they provided. We've saved tens of thousands in software licensing fees alone."
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The Sun Fire servers' UltraSPARC processors with CoolThreads technology also helped BMMI save space and consume less energy. For example, the Sun Fire T2000 server runs up to 32 compute threads concurrently and has 64 GB memory, yet needs only 2RU of rack space and 275 watts of power. By consolidating Windows and UNIX systems on the Sun Fire servers, BMMI has reduced its data center size by 50 percent.
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Don Obert, Chief Technology Officer, Bank of America
Bank of America is committed to using technology to reduce the company's impact on the environment, particularly in the area of energy consumption. They recently added the Sun Fire T2000 server running Solaris 10 as one piece of this commitment.
"We at Bank of America are doing our part by selecting environmentally friendly products such as the Sun Fire T2000. These servers utilize less space and consume much less energy while delivering significantly improved performance. Taking advantage of this opportunity to do what is right for the environment while at the same time improving our customers' experience is the perfect combination for us."
Randy Mills, Supervisor of Information Systems, Benton Public Utility District
"With Sun's Try and Buy program, it was easy to try a Sun Fire T2000 server-and the result was a 50 percent improvement in key customer service processing times."
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Rorie Devine, Chief Technology Officer, Betfair
"We replaced racks and racks of Dell servers with Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers. The result is more computing power in the same physical space and significantly less powera double win for us. Thanks largely to the savings of the Sun eco responsible servers, Betfair has achieved 200% usage growth - all within the same datacenter space."
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Wolfgang Danzinger, Leader of Infrastructure Operation, BRZ
"We strategically rely on the T2000 technology. It is particularly well suited for portal solutions. Due to the great partitioning capabilities of the machine, the T2000 is also an ideal choice for small customers."
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Tomohiko Saito, System Group Manager, C.A. Mobile
"Using low-power-consumption servers resulted in reduced rack and electricity expenses. The more we use, the faster the return on our investment; we anticipate the returns in no time. By switching to high-performance Sun servers, we can slow down the pace of server growth, and system administration will be much easier."
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Wenceslao Berriel, Head of the Computer Programming Service, Canary Islands Health Service
"For us, the low energy consumption of the Sun Ray Virtual Display Clients and the Sun servers based on the Ultra SPARC T1 processor ratify one of the basic principles of the Canary Islands Energy Plan (PECAN 2006): the saving of energy."
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Mr. Frankie Wong, Senior Vice President, Network Planning, CASCADE Limited.
"Our major client PCCW Limited needs to continually keep up-to-date with
the latest technology offerings and we are always looking at ways to
expand the services we offer. Part of this is ensuring our backend is as
efficient and cost effective as possible. We selected the Sun Blade 6000
Modular System with T6300 server modules powered by the UltraSPARC® T1
processor with CoolThreadsT technology to replace our existing rackmount
servers. We chose the solution due to its ability to save space,
minimise power usage and grow with the company."
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T.B.R. Joseph, Dy General Manager (IT), Catholic Syrian Bank
"Sun's solution architecture design had the right combination of software and hardware products. Sun has laid a world-class IT foundation based on innovation and excellence. This offering will enable us to scale our infrastructure as we grow from strength to strength and help us become a financial institution delivering world-class services. "
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Aad van Boven, Senior Manager, IT Operations, Casema
"We selected Sun Fire T2000 servers for this environment because they are ideally suited for Web and self-service applications. They meet our architectural specifications, offer high computational capacity and are able to effortlessly handle the required workload. At the same time, they use less energy and occupy less space than other servers in their class."
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Central Bank of Egypt has selected Sun to help modernize and restructure its infrastructure. The project, which is the largest undertaken between Sun and the Central Bank of Egypt, will include Sun Fire T2000 servers based on the UltraSPARC TI Processor, which have revolutionized the processor market with their strong performance and power saving, and the Solaris 10 Operating System.
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Ed Molina, Manager of Strategic Services, City of Henderson
"We're so impressed with the performance and cost of the Sun Fire T2000 that we're adopting it as our standard platform for all Unix-based applications. A dozen more server consolidations are planned and they are all going on the T2000. There is no better choice for an organization like ours, which is facing unlimited growth while trying to reduce operating costs. It's a great solution for the budget and the environment."
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Olivier Loscul, Head of Unix Systems at Deutsche Bröse, Clearstream
As an integral part of the Deutsche Bröse Group, Clearstream offers settlement and custody services to more than 2,500 customers world-wide, covering over 150,000 domestic and internationally traded bonds and equities. They maintain strong links to counterparts in 40 domestic markets, ensuring the timely and secure transfer of securities ownership and matching payment. Backed by flexible securities lending and collateral management services, Clearstream offers one of the most comprehensive international securities services available, settling more than 250,000 transactions daily. Clearstream wanted to test the new Sun Fire T2000 to see how well it would fit into this environment.
"The very first benchmark that we made with this "cool technology" demonstrated a fairly good performance. In fact, we were using only a 32th of what this box can deliver. When we started increasing the load - simulating more and more users - we've been amazed how far we could go! We simply overtook all of our previous tests with much more expensive hardware.This technology is definitively a big step forward for all applications requiring parallelism. In our data centers, where footprint and electricity consumption are key, this is exactly the kind of solution we were waiting for."
Chuck Sears, Director, Research Computing
Among the many customers who tested the Sun Fire T2000 is The College of Oceanic & Atmospheric Sciences, a graduate research college (one of 11) at Oregon State University (OSU). The College is one of the 10 members of the Joint Oceanographic Institutions of the United States, and is one of the best oceanographic and atmospheric science institutions in the nation. The Research Computing department, managed by Chuck Sears, houses a world-class set of computing solutions that facilitate the collection, simulation, analysis, visualization and dissemination of large complex scientific datasets within their organization and abroad to other institutional users. The Sun Fire T2000 was tested with a series of in-house decision support applications including analytic models, allowing researchers to mine data to identify and respond to problems quickly, and to make decisions in near real-time.
"We were extremely pleased with this system right out of the box. It is well designed, managed and very serviceable. It is an impressive unit in how it processes and serves up business functionality such as web services and messaging infrastructure loads. Early indications with a very small amount of performance enhancements to our code bases are yielding 3 to 4 times increases over some other of our systems. Processing time for the workflow has been reduced from about 22 minutes to 5 minutes. Our internal code bases are running so fast that we were not sure if they were actually working correctly. In some cases we are seeing 12-15 times improvement over previous SPARC based work flows. It appears on our initial test cases that this machine will FLY. What's also clear is Sun continues to make good on their statements about Investment Protection, particularly around binary compatibility--our third party applications ran with no problems."
Patrick Burns, Vice President, Information Technology, Colorado State University
It's very important to us to minimize our footprint and have low-power density and small-volume equipment.
Sun's hardware absolutely meets all of those criteria. . .We love it, especially the new boxes that perform
incredibly well and have very low environmental heat, power, and cooling footprints. "
Comic Relief has refreshed its IT infrastructure to handle donations more effectively and offer website visitors Web 2.0-based features in time for Red Nose Day.
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Alexander Katz, Director, Platforms Product Management, Comverse
Comverse, a unit of Comverse Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: CMVT), is the world's leading provider of software and systems enabling network-based multimedia enhanced communication and billing services. The company's Total Communication[sm] portfolio includes value-added messaging, personalized data and content-based services, and real-time converged billing solutions. Over 450 communication and content service providers in more than 120 countries use Comverse products to generate revenues, strengthen customer loyalty and improve operational efficiency.
"We evaluated the Sun Fire T1000 server for our product needs in Value-Added Services. Our benchmark results show significant overall performance gains over existing Sun servers. We are pleased with these results and will continue work with Sun to deploy CMT technologies in our next generation systems"
For additional information, visit the Comverse website at www.comverse.com or the Comverse Technology website at www.cmvt.com.
George Claffey, CIO, Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium
"A Wintel platform was never an option for our Vista e-learning applications. The Sun equipment has been a great foundation. It's been ultra-stable and reliable. Issues with Sun are always solved long before they reach my desk, and that makes me happy."
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Daniel Bacus, Enterprise Engineer, Corrections Corporation of America
"We were astounded to see that network based backups were consistently completing 40% faster than they had been when running on the 280R. We expected some increase in how fast things would complete, but 40% faster wasn't even in the realm of possibility in our minds. The previous daily back-ups ran for 22 hours. The Sun Fire T2000 was doing the same job in 13 hours. WOW!"
"All I can say is that the Sun Fire T2000 can just, flat out, move data. Thank you for a great NetBackup server!"
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Heather Peck, Infrastructure Manager, eBay Inc.
"Niagaras run much cooler than our previous servers, plus they are scary fast. They've cut our total cost of operations [TCO] through lower acquisition and management costs. The Sun Fire T2000 will be our database platform of choice in 2007."
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Larry Lozon, Vice President, Data Center Services, EDS
EDS provides a broad portfolio of business and technology solutions to help its clients worldwide improve their business performance. EDS core portfolio comprises information-technology, applications and business process services, as well as information-technology transformation services. Testing the Sun Fire T2000 in their current infrastructure provided some astonishing results.
"We are pleased with the cost, throughput performance and power economics of the Sun Fire T2000 servers. Reducing power consumption in our data centers is crucial. During our initial testing, we experienced a 50 percent decrease in server power consumption. We are seeing server power consumption as a critical cost factor in serving our client's data center needs. These 32 thread processor-based servers will be a major component within our Infrastructure Transformation service offering, providing an ideal landing zone for platform re-hosting and technology refresh of high-throughput workloads. This will lay the foundation for a tech refresh strategy focused on improving our client's application performance while reducing space and power consumption in EDS' data centers."
Rodrigo Garcia, Technical Manager, EURIDISS
"With Sun technology at the core of our infrastructure, we can deliver the highest level of security solutions, which will benefit our customers and enable us to be more competitive."
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Matthias Schorer, Chief Architect
One of the leading Systems Integrators for the banking industry, Fiducia IT AG hosts the IT infrastructure for all of the cooperative banks in half of Germany. Their huge data center boasts one of the biggest Java Applications in the world, called agree(R) which is based on Fiducia's Java Banking Framework (JBF). More than 100,000 workstations and 20,000 ATMs are connected to 800+ Sun Fire V440 Servers. After testing the Sun Fire T2000 and comparing its performance against other leading platforms, they were convinced that the Sun Fire T2000 was the right system for the future.
"Unpacking the box we couldn't believe a 32 thread server could be so small. But after running our own benchmarks it's pretty clear that looks can be deceiving. With the Sun Fire T2000 servers we'll be able to replace our current servers at a rate of 4:1 while doubling our performance. And if that's not enough it, it looks like we'll be able to cut our energy use from 5.2 to .35 kw/hour. That's a factor of 14. Amazing!"
Warren Habib, CTO, Fotolog
With over 3 million users and 100 million viewable pictures, Fotolog is one of the world's leading photo blog sites. Fotolog allows people to create a personal, daily photo blog and share it with family, friends, and people around the world. This site is growing so rapidly that Fotolog's IT team found themselves in need of a much faster way to serve its community, and decided to try out the new Sun Fire T1000 server.
"Numbers don't lie - we experienced a 300% performance increase after we started using the T1000s. In a third of the space at a third of the power consumption, we were able to build out our infrastructure enough to maintain the excellent level of service Fotolog members expect. We hope to double our views per day in the next three months, and couldn't handle that kind of traffic without the T1000s."
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The company initially purchased the Sun Fire T1000 and the Sun Fire V40z servers through the program. Both servers were running Red Hat Fedora Core 7 operating system, which handled parallel and distributed processing as the company developed and tested the mapping Web services platform. FortiusOne knew that these systems had the capabilities it needed to bring the GeoCommons mapping solution to market more quickly.
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"We are pleased with our cooperation with Sun Microsystems. We are especially attracted by the fact that this company develops innovative products and solutions. We are always very interested in Sun's new products, and try to test and use those that can help us solve our specific problems." – Vitaly Zverev, Data Center Director, GENEZIS Holding
Glasses Direct, a UK internet retailer of cut price prescription glasses, is the world's largest direct seller of prescription glasses, selling on average a pair every six minutes. With numerous business and entrepreneurial awards to its credit, the company has flourished in a market where glasses are often overpriced and it quickly outgrew its small offices based in Wiltshire. Requiring a platform that could scale with its fast-growing demand, the company selected Sun's MySQL database running the Solaris 10 Operating System and Coolthread technology. Glasses Direct earns the distinction as the first European Sun Startup Essentials managed hosting customer and is managed by Sun's managed hosting partner, NTT Europe Online. As a result, Glasses Direct has been able to implement a secure, stable and reliable platform built on cutting-edge technologies and has resulted in a 300 percent performance improvement in its website.
Antonio Calafat, Director, Globalia Sistemas y Comunicaciónes
"The Sun platform, coupled with Oracle technology, the know-how of Globalia Sistemas y Comunicaciones, and the high value services brought to the project enable all the technological requirements of the Corporation, which is currently involved in a significant expansion process, to be fully satisfied."
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Stein Myrseth, Chief Architect, Software Innovation, Government of Norway
"A key part of the success of this deployment has been the Sun Java Enterprise System's ease of integration."
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Dr. Kenneth Edgecombe, Executive Director, HPCVL
"The Sun relationship is a partnership where people stay at the table and contribute resources and knowledge. There's a give and take and a willingness to share information about technology developments."
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Andy Bien, General Manager of Information Services, Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Ltd
"The mutlicore, multithreading processor enables us to partition the T2000s so we can run multiple development and testing web tier environments on the same machine which simplifies things and saves a lot of space and power in the data centre."
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Insurance Corporation of British Columbia ICBC is increasingly standardizing on Sun Fire T2000 servers to take advantage of superior price-performance and power savings. The company is using Logical Domains (LDoms) to further increase server utilization, by running multiple copies of the operating system simultaneously.
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This paper explores customer adoption of CoolThreads systems since their market introduction in December 2005, focusing on the range of workloads that are running today on this chip multithreaded (CMT) platform. In addition, IDC has interviewed customers who have adopted Niagara to learn about the IT requirements that Niagara addresses — and the deployment patterns found in those sites.
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Yoshikazu Koike, Deputy Director, JICA
"At JICA, demand for energy conservation is growing stronger. Now that we have employed Sun servers, we can drastically cut down on power consumption."
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Jason Hoffman, CTO, Joyent Inc.
"The UltraSPARC T1 processors are supercomputers on a chip, with half the power and cooling needs of Intel Xeon chips. There's no competition today for servers built with Sun CoolThreads technology."
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Read the Information Week article
David Young, CEO of Joyent, a provider of e-mail and storage services, says he saw immediate benefits in moving to UltraSparc T1-based systems. With a customer base doubling each of the past two years, Joyent attempted to increase capacity at a co-location facility, but was told there was no available power.
Joyent consolidated a number of older Intel-based Dell servers onto 20 Sun servers. Each Sun server saved the company more than $1,000 per year in power and cooling costs, and generated an additional $1,000 per year in rebates from the utility provider.
"If I can save $4,000 a month, that's someone else I can hire to improve our service to our customers," he says.
Watch Joyent's CEO discuss his experiences with Sun Fire CoolThreads servers
Mr. Ng Kian Swan, Director of Operations, Alexandra Hospital (parent company of JMC)
"With the help of Singapore Computer Systems and Sun Microsystems, JMC implemented the integrated Hospital Information System, as we believe it will provide information that is relevant and fast to help support decision making and streamline processes."
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KDDI Corporation, one of the leading telecom carriers providing fixed mobile and IP services in Japan, with over 26M mobile subscribers and with the #1 net subscriber growth over the last three consecutive years, has chosen Sun Microsystems infrastructure to help support KDDI's mobile internet services.
A hundred Sun Fire servers based on the UltraSPARC T1 processor running Solaris 10 OS have been installed as the gateway platform of "EZweb" for KDDI "au" mobile internet services. The new infrastructure has delivered more than a 150% performance increase while saving 60% in power consumption, when compared with existing servers. Sun Microsystems continues to support KDDI's leading-edge mobile services with innovative technology and products.
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The Sun Fire T2000 server with CoolThreads technology offered KDMC triple the throughput of competing systems with half the power consumption and half the data center footprint.
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KnowledgeBase Marketing
This high-performance, reliable open systems environment made it possible for the customer to migrate batch processing off its mainframe system, reducing overall transaction costs by 86 percent. The newest additions to the grid, Sun Fire T2000 servers running Solaris 10, meet the demands of multithreaded I/O-intensive applications such as a National Change of Address (NCOALinkTM) processing system that handles 40 million transactions per hour.
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Greg Hearn, Senior Systems Administrator, Las Vegas Valley Water District
"Sun gives us high reliability in systems, high availability for our own customers, expert consulting and support, and a completely engineered solution based on strong partnerships with our other vendors."
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Melvin Thompson, UNIX infrastructure manager, Leeds City Council
"The value-add from Sun Services was in resolving the challenges of migrating from an old system to a new one without losing any data. They took us through different designs, showed us the pros and cons of each one, and helped us come up with a picture of how everything was going to work in advance. As a result of this close collaboration, we comfortably achieved our migration goals of no data loss and minimal service disruption."
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A Sun Fire T2000 server was supplied by Sun as part of the Try and Buy Program. With an extremely limited budget, Lokalisten.de found Sun's offer to try its server risk-free for 60 days attractive. Lokalisten.de deployed Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers running Solaris 10 and optimized for highly parallel Internet applications. With the eight-core UltraSPARC T1 processor, the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 Internet servers can process up 32 tasks simultaneously. This makes them ideal for dynamic Internet applications serving many users concurrently.
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David Kinsman, Chief Operating Officer, Mansion.com
Mansion.com replaced its x86 blade servers running Windows and Linux with a standard Sun technology platform based on Solaris 10 and Sun Fire T2000 servers, resulting in:
- An eco-friendly solution using less power
- Increasing performance threefold for each server
- Reducing rack space and server footprint
- Providing high availability and reliability for 24x7 operations
"With Solaris 10 containers we can now virtualize our IT resources and dynamically allocate CPU power and memory to each server. And that means zero wastage of IT resources."
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Christopher Peterson, Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Technology Officer, MDA Federal
"Everything we've accomplished here at MDA Federal – including becoming a leader in global mapping – has been enabled by our Sun SAM architecture. Without it, the cost of storage, power, cooling, and labor would have been too expensive."
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Justin Shaffer, Major League Baseball Advanced Media vice president and chief architect
"MLB.com is one of the Internet's most successful broadband portals devoted to professional sports, with more than 1 billion minutes of streaming media and over 2,430 full-length games offered to more than 1.5 billion visitors in 2005. Sun has been a trusted technology partner and we look forward to trying their new Chip Multithreading Technology. During the season on average our site receives 6 to 7 million visitors daily and they view more than 50 million pages per day. We are always open to trying new technology that can deliver a performance enhancement to our visitors, while also reducing our overall data center costs."
Toshiro Kawamura, Senior Executive Vice President and member of the board at NEC
NEC Corporation (NASDAQ: NIPNY) (FTSE: 6701q.l) is one of the world's leading providers of Internet, broadband network and enterprise business solutions, dedicated to meeting the specialized needs of its diverse and global base of customers. Ranked as one of the world's top patent-producing companies, NEC delivers tailored solutions in the key fields of computer, networking and electron devices, by integrating its technical strengths in IT and Networks, and by providing advanced semiconductor solutions through NEC Electronics Corporation.
"We are very glad to hear that Sun has announced the UltraSPARC T1 systems. We evaluated a major ERP application on UltraSPARC T1 and have gotten good performance in our initial results. We expect this new product to contribute significantly to the growth of our system integration business, both in web applications and in other application areas such as ERP."
View Strato's CTO discussing his experiences with Sun Fire CoolThreads servers
Steve Guntly, Manager, Systems Administration, netINS Inc
"Knowing that I'm going to continue to see e-mail and spam doubling roughly every three years, I fully believe these Sun Fire T2000 servers are going to be capable of handling their load at least five years into the future."
The National Health Service (NHS) in England, one of the world's largest employers globally, awarded BT the contract to deliver the national data Spine, which carries summary information about healthcare and forms the core of the NHS Care Records Service (NHS CRS), as part of the NHS National Programme for Information Technology - believed to be the world's largest civilian IT project. Sun supports BT as a major partner to deliver this system. To date BT and Sun have deployed over 1000 x64 and UltraSPARC processor-based Sun Fire servers and the Sun Java Enterprise System (Java ES) as the foundation for the NHS CRS infrastructure, which will provide an integrated care records service for the country's 50 million citizens. The entire NHS CRS system is written in Java utilising Java ES components, including components of the Java System Identity Management Suite which will provide a national approach to authentication, security and confidentiality. With a dedicated team of 100 Sun professionals, Sun has been able to support BT in delivering a better NHS service through its responsibility for the day-to-day running of all Sun servers and storage as part of a managed services solution.
NaviSite frequently specifies Sun UltraSPARC servers with the Solaris Operation System for selected applications that require a high level of performance, reliability and security.
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Denis Haman, Technical and Product Director for Fantasy Games, News International
"With the World Cup just days away we are gearing up for a huge increase in the numbers of people registering their fantasy teams with us. The hardware and operating systems from Sun will ensure that we can deal with the sudden high-volume of activity and ensure that it remains stable and available throughout the competition, in addition to us being able to provide a reliable service, providing us with considerable cost and space savings, the new Sun servers run more efficiently helping News International to become a more environmentally responsible organisation."
See the press release for more information
Mr. Shinichi Yamada, Senior Vice President, Platform Sector
NTT DATA is the largest System Integrator in Japan. With its vision of "Global IT Innovator", NTT DATA is committed to using IT to shape the affluent society of the future, a place where information can be accessed at any time and in any place. They have been developing and operating across a broad front, ranging from nationwide systems that formed the cornerstones of society to a multiplicity of corporate network systems. For these critical platforms, their requirements have always been reliability, scalability, and better price/performance.
"We are pleased to see that Sun Microsystems has announced the new Sun Fire CoolThreads Server Family product line. Having evaluated the UltraSPARC T1 processor, we found that the high throughput, efficient power usage and affinity with the Java Application server makes it ideal for the core platform of the online systems we develop and operate. With its high availability and high performance, we are sure that the combination of Sun's advanced technology and NTT DATA's System Integration capability makes it possible to offer optimum solutions with high value add for our customers."
Michael Minichino, Director of Infrastructure at Parago
Parago has the simple goal of helping companies build relationships with their customers. They design, develop and manage marketing programs aimed at attracting new customers, establishing strong relationships, and encouraging long-term loyalty. Combining creative problem solving, technology innovation and sound business strategies, Parago delivers complete solutions that actually solve real marketing problems. As part of their never ending commitment to delivering world class solutions, they recently added the new Sun Fire T2000 to their infrastructure.
"We effectively got half our data center back. Data center space is premium real estate. We had many large systems deployed in various capacities occupying rack space. Leveraging Sun's latest hardware offerings, including the T2000, in conjunction with Solaris 10 Containers, we were able to reduce our footprint. The addition of innovative CoolThreads technology to Sun's product list is exciting as it delivers a powerful enterprise class Solaris platform at an attractive acquisition cost."
Tom Cignarella, Senior Director of Technical Operations at Planet Out Inc
"Sun has hit a home run with the combination of Solaris 10 running on the UltraSPARC T1-based servers. The performance is outstanding, and updated features like Solaris Containers which allow us to create zones are easy to setup yet extremely powerful. Since obtaining our first T1000 with the Try and Buy program, we were able to replace nearly 300 aging servers with 25 Sun Fire T1000's and we have greater capacity than before. The T1000 has no competition at this time, and what Sun has done makes other new servers seem outdated."
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Read the Sun press release
Paul Monaghan, Manager, Primus Service Platform Engineering team
"When we failed over from the old system to the T2000, the application went from 50 per cent CPU utilization, down to 15 per cent. We were just dumbfounded to learn that it was only using 15 per cent of one core of this eight core CPU."
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Powerful and energy efficient Sun Fire x64 and Sun Fire UltraSPARC T1 CoolThreads servers will deliver the flexibility to handle large workloads and the scalability to easily expand as the province's requirements grow. The entire network will be powered by the Solaris 10 Operating System, the most stable and secure operating system available.
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Jeff Whitehead, CEO, Real Time Matrix
"Just by saving the expensive engineering time that would have been required to deploy and test code in a distributed environment, I estimate that the Sun Fire T2000 server delivered the flexibility we needed while paying for itself in just three to six months."
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Jeff Whitehead, CEO of The Real Time Matrix
"We need a stable, robust infrastructure to process millions of items a day, match against millions of preferences and run 24/7. For high-speed, high-performance, 100 percent raw computing, we are finding it is cheaper and better on Sun and Solaris."
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Read the ServerWatch article
"A Sun Fire T2000 server running the Solaris 10 Operating System was chosen for the Sun Ray Software due to its CoolThreads technology and excellent price/performance ratio."
Sarah Nelson, Medecins Sans Frontieres UK
"Knowing that AlertNet is now supported by the powerful Sun technology gives us confidence that we will have access to information that helps our our humanitarian mission."
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An Vranken, Assistant Training Manager, SAP Belgium Education Center
"As an innovative IT company it, is only logical that we offer our trainees state-of-the-art training facilities. The solution of Sun Microsystems, a world leader and trendsetter in the field of hardware, fits in perfectly with the desired image of our company."
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Joel Zysman, Director of Scientific Computing at Scripps Florida
"The price/performance ratio running Oracle 10g on the Sun Fire T2000 server is simply phenomenal."
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Bryan Allen, Executive Director of Enterprise IT Operations, Scripps Networks
"The Sun platform has been a stable, consistent and reliable platform for us, with good performance and scalability. We are always responding to new requirements as we continue to push the envelope on the Internet. Sun's support has been very valuable in helping us meet day-to-day requirements, as well as new and unique ones."
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In order to create a robust, scalable infrastructure for its Global Wealth Management platform, SEI developed major components of its application in Java and chose to operate them on an array of Sun Fire servers running the Solaris Operating System. SEI, a Pennsylvania firm providing outsourced asset management, investment processing and operations' solutions, opted for a combination of UltraSPARC T1 processor-based Sun Fire servers for horizontal scaling and UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based servers to vertically scale the application as usage grows. SEI also engaged Sun Services for maintenance and professional services support, noting that Sun's outstanding support model and the superior performance and reliability of its servers were critical in the firm's purchase decision.
Li Songbo, Chief Technology Officer, Sina
"The Sun Fire T1000 server's CoolThreads and multi-core technology and support for the 'Green Computing' standard set a milestone for the entire Internet service industry."
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Sean Crooks, Senior Programmer/Analyst, South Dakota Library Networks
"By using the Sun Try-and-Buy program we were able to fully test the Sun Fire T2000 before buying it. During the tests of the server we were able to see what it was capable of doing and were never able to break it no matter what type of load we threw at it. With such a small footprint and high performance, we knew this server was exactly what we were looking for to run our web applications. In addition, without the Upgrade Advantage Program we would not have been able to fit the upgrade to our Sun Fire V1280 servers into our budget this year. Because Sun offered us a credit for the parts being upgraded, we were able to enhance our current systems and increase server response time to our customers by nearly 20%."
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Strato replaced the majority of its servers used for shared Web hosting with Sun Fire T2000 servers running Solaris 10. Each pair of servers replace on average 36 servers from the older infrastructure. Strato reduced the power requirements for the servers by 90% and the amount of space required in the computer center by 20%. The server replacements eliminated the need to completely relocate the computer center to other premises and also created extra space for future expansion. In addition, the use of Solaris 10 on all Sun servers results in substantial cost savings in administration.
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View Strato's CTO discussing his experiences with Sun Fire CoolThreads servers
Dean Nelson, Director of Global Lab & Datacenter Design Services (GDS), Sun Microsystems Inc
"The hardware replacement program is a perfect example of how investments in Sun's newer technologies can produce massive cost savings and productivity improvements. But it's even bigger than that. It helps the environment. We're applying our Eco strategy in our own backyard."
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Linda Martino, Vice President, Information Technology, Sun Microsystems Inc
"Sun and Oracle's Siebel CRM applications offer a single database, application and Web platform that delivers proven reliability, availability and scalability.
The solutions architecture scales from the smallest to the largest requirement, offering the leading CRM suite on the leading industry platform."
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Will Snow, Senior Director, Web Platform Engineering, Sun Microsystems
"We looked for the servers that would provide the best combination of efficiency, rack space conservation and performance, and the T2000 came out on top."
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Christian Kattenbusch, Project Leader for CRM and Identity Management, Swisscom Mobile
"For half the price of the old environment, we will get a substantial improvement in scalability and availability. We are extremely impressed with the performance of the T2000 server and are interested in consolidating other machines to the new Sun systems. One of my biggest challenges is getting everything under one roof. Each and every floor tile in the data center is important. With the Sun Fire T2000 servers, 12 machines can do the work of 60 previous-generation servers. That saves space, it saves money, and I get the latest technology on a very powerful and flexible machine."
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Bill Barz, Lead Architect, Travelers
"Solaris Zones are absolutely great. They are very reliable and easy to set up. They don't break. Virtualization in Solaris runs circles around competitive technologies. Also, our T2000s have 32 threads which are presented as virtual CPUs, which enables us to use fewer servers while supporting many, many threads."
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Time Warner Cable is using Sun's Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 broadly and have found it to be reliable platform in their service delivery.
Gary Teo, Senior Manager, Education, Technology and Product, SIM University
"That is where Sun has been most helpful - to ensure that we get a robust, stable and scalable architecture right from the beginning."
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Jacinto de Castro, Director Information Technology Services Division, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
"After assessing the possible solutions and suppliers, our institution chose Sun to carry out the project due to the robustness, scalability, and simple licensing of the Java Enterprise System platform."
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Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) selected UltraSPARC T1-based Sun servers running the Solaris 10 OS to support essential IT operations including human resources, payroll, finance and student services. The university chose Sun technology for its price/performance -- twice the performance at half the cost of competitors, including hardware incumbent HP -- as well as Sun's strong reputation in the higher education sector. UQAM also engaged Sun Services to assist with the system deployment.
A key benefit of the Sun Fire T2000 server is its low power consumption and heat footprint, which allows for installation of additional Sun Fire T2000 servers without burdening the datacenter with additional overhead.
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Martine Carassik, Associate Director - Information Systems, University of Salford
"The reason we chose Sun Microsystems was that we were looking for a strategic partner, not a vendor. We wanted someone who shared our vision of the Digital Campus."
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Peter Downs, Director, UNIX Systems Administrator, The University of St. Thomas (UST)
The University of St. Thomas (UST), founded in 1885 in St. Paul, Minnesota,is home to more that 10,000 students, offering bachelors degrees in over 85 major fields of study and more than 45 graduate degree programs including masters, education specialist, juris doctor and doctorates. As the state's largest independent college or university, it emphasizes values-centered, career-oriented education. U.S. News & World Report's "Best Colleges" survey in 2005 placed St. Thomas in the national universities-doctoral category where it was listed in the third of four tiers. St. Thomas is rolling out thin clients across campus to meet productivity needs yet reduce support costs. St. Thomas turned to the T2000 as a key part of the solution.
"Using the T2000 server we have found that the UltraSparc T1 chip is well designed for network facing tasks. It can handle many kiosk mode Sun Rays using the Sun Ray Connector for Windows, reducing the space and power requirements. We have also found that using Resource Manager to assign individual T1 cores to Solaris Containers is an excellent method of carving the compute resources in the T2000 server, making it an obvious choice for server consolidation."
Thomas Nau, Head of the Communication and Information Center, Infrastructure Department
Founded in 1967, the University of Ulm, located in Ulm, Germany, is a specialized technical university dedicated to the teaching of science and medicine. Designed theoretically and architecturally as an elite technical institute of higher learning where teaching and research co-exist under one roof, the university offers degrees in the natural sciences, medicine, electrical engineering, mathematics, and computer science. As one of Germany's foremost medical and scientific institutions, the university demands a huge amount of reliable computing power to drive high-level scientific, chemical, mathematical, engineering, and medical research computations. Recently they purchased three Sun Fire T2000s to add to this infrastructure.
"We are using Sun Fire T2000's to provide central mail and directory as well as www and file services to 7000+ users at the university. We've had them installed in production for 3 months and have experienced great performance without any glitches. We are currently testing another T2000 with which is going to be deployed as a Sun Ray server. Considering the high performance for appropriately selected applications as well as the low power and space consumption of the Sun Fire CoolThreads servers we are definitely looking into working with more of these in the future."
University of York The university bought a campus license for Sun Secure Global Desktop software, running the application on Sun Fire T1000 servers. The Sun Fire T1000 servers with CoolThreads technology have been shown to triple performance, while cutting power and space consumption by 3X. In an initial trial, 50 students began receiving access to their applications via Sun Secure Global Desktop. The feedback thus far has been very positive. As for administrative applications, the university is also in the process of standardizing their delivery using Sun Secure Global Desktop software, to a population of 2,000 desktops.
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The Army chose to deploy a clustered Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System as Web tier servers, taking advantage of shared multithreading technology for higher capacity.
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Tim Smith, President, Vonage Network Inc
"The Internet communications business is all about delivering service faster, cheaper and more reliably. The Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers give us the performance, space, power and ultimately cost savings that we need to compete effectively. We have a good working relationship with Sun as well. Their people know what we need and work with us to meet our technical requirements."
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Read the ComputerWorld story
Vladimir Phillipov, Vice-President, and IT Director
In October 2005 Beeline(R), used by VympelCom Group to carry out operations, reached the top rating of the strongest and most valuable brands in Russia. The Beeline brand was estimated to be around $5 Billion US dollars, about half of the value of the company.
As the executives of the company say, brand is not just a beautifullogo, but an implemented promise. Renewed in 2005, Beeline carries a promise of being simple, bright, friendly, effective, and a promise of a positive experience. This means that the quality of the IT implementation is an important part of brand equity - the customer can have a positive experience from the company only if the company's systems are fast and reliable. That's why Vympelcom's IT Department turned to Sun for state-of-the-art technologies like the Sun Fire T2000 server.
"Speaking of the testing, one can't help mentioning that the T2000 was not specially prepared, where certain environments aimed at demonstrating maximum server performance are used. We have just ported applications to a new server without using either optimized versions of operating systems or applications, or any other prepared conditions. It was a field test, and it is worth saying that the T2000 has passed it with excellent results."
"We are extremely satisfied", said Dmitry Valetin, Head of System Administrator Department, IT Director of VympelCom, sharing his emotions. "Multiple performance growth with reduced power consumption is what any system administrator and IT professional can dream about. It is also worth mentioning that Solaris 8 applications have been just ported to Solaris 10 without any recompilation or other modifications".
About the project
To conduct the test, the Sun Fire T2000 server with one UltraSPARC T1 processor supporting CoolThreads technology was used, which was compared to operations with an UltraSPARC III 900 MHz processor.
One should emphasize that all tests have been conducted in an absolutely real-life environment, with no special preparation aimed at obtaining outstanding benchmark results; standard configurations, operating applications and Java version (1.3.1) were used.
For stress testing, APILink application, part of a billing system running under BEA Weblogic, was selected. APILink is responsible for connecting billing with the rest of the applications - for example, with CRM-system, payment system, and many others. Performance of this interface should be extremely high to support the necessary level of customer service.
In this test, the Sun Fire T2000 server has outperformed 8 processor Sun Fire V880 by 30 - 40 percent. It is also worth mentioning that T2000 is one-tenth the size of the Sun Fire V880, while its power consumption is 3-4 times lower than that of existing systems.
Vympelkom has used Sun Microsystems' solutions since 1999. Sun's servers and software support billing activities of the company.
Group of the companies Vympelkom includes telecom providers in Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. Telecom provider licenses from Vympelkom are provided for the territories where 200 million people live. Geographically Beeline's net covers 78 regions of Russia (136,5 million residents which is 94% of Russia population), Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. OAO Vympelkom became the first Russian company to enter the listing of NYSE (NYSE: VIP)
Mr. Koichi Takeshima, General Manager, Information Systems Department, Zen-Nippon Shokuhin Co., Ltd.
"Sun has good reputation as an open system vendor, and based on my own experience, I know that the Solaris Operating System has a very high-level of reliability."
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ZhengTu Network Technology Ltd
"System performance, stability, and reliability have improved markedly. Performance has increased by more than 50 percent, delivering a smooth user experience. ZhengTu Network has also been able to complete projects faster."
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UltraSPARC T2 / T2 Plus-Based Servers
"We were interested in evaluating the modern UltraSPARC T2 processor technology (at 1.4 GHz) to compare to legacy servers, in order to asses the savings for power and cooling capacity. From the HPC perspective UltraSPARC T2 Processor Chips are characterized by a high number of simultaneous threads per chip and a high memory bandwidth per chip. Therefore we ran a range of production codes, comparing performance, throughput, and power consumption in relation to performance and throughput. Parallel applications – we employ multi-threading with OpenMP and message passing with MPI heavily – scale well on the UltraSPARC T2 processor. A single UltraSPARC T2 processor provides a higher memory bandwidth than full blown 24 socket legacy systems. In summary, there is an important class of HPC applications which run very well on the UltraSPARC T2 Processor: Parallel programs, which consume a high memory bandwidth, profit from this processor's architecture. Multiple instances of such codes display a very favorable throughput. Taking the low power consumption of the UltraSPARC T2 processor into account, replacing our existing legacy equipment for HPC is a highly attractive option, a long away ahead of any other competitive offering." – Dieter an Mey, HPC Team Lead, RWTH Aachen University
"For those who have not already spotted our 'Powered By Sun' logo, we run fav.or.it on a Sun powered UltraSPARC T2 processor with CoolThreads technology (Having 64 threads to deal with all the aggregation processes really helps!)."
Dr. Ken Edgecombe, Executive Director, HPCVL
"Our staff and a number of researchers have been testing their codes with the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 server and have found that most codes scale extremely well on these systems. We have installed 78 of these multithreaded systems to help meet the growing needs of our user base and to help researchers get experience with this new paradigm. Using the capacity provided through this multi-threading model, researchers will get more work done.
This is a paradigm shift in how you think of doing your computations. Each thread is not a CPU core, unlike in the past, but a process that shares the same core with up to seven other threads. Although the individual threads may not be as fast as on some single threaded processors, the ability to scale gives the throughput that makes the T5140 server a great investment."
"While the previous generation UltraSPARC T1 was certainly an innovative design, the new UltraSPARC T2 brings the platform a far greater level of maturity which we believe will help the 'Niagara' concept reach its potential as a disruptive technology....the new servers announced today have the potential to claim significant market share amongst web serving, cryptography and smaller database users."
Jason Bond Pratt, CIO, IT.com, Inc
"Our biggest challenge is how to accelerate the discovery process for our customers. That means
ingesting data, parsing it, indexing it in several ways and lastly running an extremely computationally intensive machine
learning algorithm. Anyone can scale "search" as such, some for the entire Web, but we are doing much more than
ordinary search. What we found is that the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server provided an unbelievable capability we never
thought possible from any cluster of general purpose servers and at a price point trivial to what that cluster would cost
to build and maintain. It is as if we had a foot race with a 200-pound pack on our back and we still flew past the competition.
Our throughput went from 3GB of data per hour on a traditional server environment to approximately 50GB of data per hour on
the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server - a massive 17x scaling increase, with no tweaking, code changes, or other optimizations required. In other words, the machine scaled our performance as a function of the number of promised threads, with no "gotchas" The performance delivered by the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server was equivalent to that of other HPC systems designed with dozens of cores - Sun said we'd get 128 threads of performance, and they delivered. The Sun Fire X4500 Data Server, when connected via iSCSI, provided all the throughput we needed to drive the processing pipeline. We look forward to using the new storage solutions coming out of Sun for even more I/O capacity and performance.
We found the computing capacity we need in a single box with a tiny space and power footprint. This is critical for our application and any many others like it in the world of Web 2.0.
In short, our experience with Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server has been simply amazing! This server is a without a doubt a cluster-killer, and enables us to provide faster response times for our customers, at lower cost and complexity than either traditional servers or niche HPC products."
Melvin Thompson, UNIX infrastructure manager, Leeds City Council
The value-add from Sun Services was in resolving the challenges of migrating from an old system to a new one without
losing any data. They took us through different designs, showed us the pros and cons of each one, and helped us come up
with a picture of how everything was going to work in advance. As a result of this close collaboration, we comfortably
achieved our migration goals of no data loss and minimal service disruption.
"By using Sun products and Sun Professional Services for our solution, we can scale horizontally, and we can scale vertically. And we don't have to change one line of our software code to run dual-core, quad-core, or sixteen-core machines — or any other hardware that Sun provides." – Jean-Luc Vaillant, Chief Technology Officer, LinkedIn
"Kip" Turco, Senior Vice President, Engineering and Operations, Motricity
The IT infrastructure powering Motricity's expanding business needed to scale to meet increased performance requirements, while reducing data center complexity and costs. "We are consistently looking for innovative ways to scale and meet the rapidly growing demands of our business." said "Kip" Turco, Senior Vice President, Engineering and Operations at Motricity. "By upgrading to Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 and T5220 CoolThreads servers running the open source Solaris operating system, we have been able to consolidate our existing Apache web servers and BEA Weblogic application servers at the rate of 8:1. Also, the T2000/T5220 continues to be an excellent platform for Oracle as well" By virtualizing our applications into Solaris Containers and using the integrated 10Gigabit Ethernet and cryptographic acceleration embedded into the Sun CoolThreads servers, we have also have been able to boost system utilization and security and improve system administrator productivity, while reducing data centre power, cooling and space requirements.
Akihisa Makita, Engineering Manager, NEC Corporation
"We've found the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 has the availability and serviceability which a server of this class requires. And this product also has the high extensibility of a maximum of 16 HDDs, which is a testament to Sun's innovative R&D and engineering skills. Moreover, the Floating Point that was limited in the UltraSPARC T1 processor design has greatly been enhanced, and we can expect even more performance now across a broader range of workloads. It is expected that this product will become one of the best solutions for ECO and Server consolidation that NEC promotes, and will heavily contribute to the expansion of our server business in the future."
"Following the receipt of a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server, based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor, we have tested a range of applications including our web server, JBoss and BEA WebLogic Java application servers, mail servers, NFS and Oracle databases." said Radoslaw Korzeniewski, IT Systems Expert at PTK Centertel. "We found our performance scaled linearly with the 64 threads available, with the result that we were able to deliver over 2x higher throughput than the Sun Fire T2000, and much higher levels of performance than our existing x86 and SPARC-based rack and blade servers. This was achieved with higher levels of power and space efficiency than anything we have experienced before. We also found installation to be quite simple, with rock solid system reliability. As a result of our tests, we will be deploying the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers to keep pace with our ever expanding customer base, while at the same time reducing operational costs through higher power and space efficiency. Ease of installation and high reliability enable us to also bring new services to market faster and with higher levels of availability – all serving to enhance our competitive position" – Radoslaw Korzeniewski, IT Systems Expert, PTK Centertel
Don Thorp, Production Systems Staff, SDSC
"We found the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server to be a hugely versatile
and reliable platform for our data center. The throughput delivered to our
expanding web services and portal applications was impressive. We also
successfully tested the T5240 running the Solaris 10 Operating System
across our 4gb FC SAN with Solaris ZFS and our 10Gigabit Ethernet HPC infrastructure, allowing us to place the T5240 strategically within the HPC topology to save power and reduce TCO. We ran the server continuously for 4 months, and encountered zero downtime. Our conclusion is that the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server is an effective replacement for more traditional mid-range SMP platforms and opens up new opportunities within HPC constellations."
"As a result of going to Sun, we improved our response time and we're sitting at less than ten percent system utilization with five times the business we had nine months ago. We have a scalable server and storage platform that can provide air cover for our sales team, and reports we get from our enterprise customers say that there's nothing faster out there." – David Simon, Chairman, SearchForce, Inc.
"One benefit for us with Sun Microsystems is its understanding of retail and its ability to architect a solution for this type of business. The second benefit is that Sun has the technology to support a transaction-intensive environment, and it can provide us a solution that can handle large amounts of data so that business runs smoothly." – Amit Mukherjee, Group CIO, RPG Group
"As Europe's second largest web host, we are always interested in testing new solutions that enable us to deliver the highest levels of service to our customers, at the lowest cost. We were one of Sun's first customers of the Sun Fire T2000 server and were delighted that this system enabled us to dramatically reduce power by over 70% and space by almost 60% in our data centers.
The new Sun SPARC Enterprise T5x20 servers will enable us to significantly extend our ability to scale quickly and efficiently, while further reducing costs. We estimate that the T5000 servers will deliver around 2.5x higher throughput than the existing T2000 servers when running our Apache web servers and mail servers, which has been proven in our testing. In terms of computing power, the T5000 offers a performance per watt ratio that is nearly doubled in a direct comparison to its predecessor the T2000. In other words, with the new line of Sun CMT-based servers, we will be able to save 43% of energy consumption compared to a direct replacement strategy of our existing T2000 servers. At the same time, we will use the extended functionality of the T5000 servers to run our floating point-intensive SPAM filters, and encrypt our SMTP traffic, ensuring higher levels of security for our customers These servers will enable us to meet our key objectives of efficiently scaling for the opportunities presented by the Participation Age." – Rene Wienholtz, CTO, Strato AG
The UK Home Office has recently awarded a contract for the VBS programme to Logica. The Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) programme has been set up in response to the weaknesses in vetting procedures identified by Sir Michael Bichard in his 2004 Inquiry Report. Sun partnered with systems integrator Logica to build a system that takes advantage of a wide range of Sun technologies including the Solaris Operating System, Sun UltraSPARC and CoolThreads servers, Sun Storage and Sun Cluster software for a cost-effective, low-risk solution. Sun Services were also engaged to assist with installation and ongoing support.
Samuel Webb Williams, PhD candidate, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley
"We've been using Chip Multithreading (CMT) based systems since Sun released
the first "Niagara" products back in late 2005. The release of the
UltraSPARC T2 processor in 2007 with its greatly enhanced Floating Point
capability enabled us to extend CMT to our most challenging high performance
computing (HPC) codes. We have since extended that work to the UltraSPARC
T2 Plus server based Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 servers,
taking advantage of the multi-socket architecture to scale performance and throughput.
We have seen great results scaling from 64 threads in the UltraSPARC T2
servers to 128 threads in the UltraSPARC T2 Plus servers for our
plasma physics and PDE codes, and from our sparse iterative kernel.
In addition, this scaling came at no cost to productivity. In fact,
we were able to scale without even recompiling the code. For our
applications, CMT technology is by far the most productive solution
to achieving high performance."
The University of Central Florida implemented a comprehensive IT solution from Sun in an effort to develop a more robust, reliable and scalable Storage Area Network (SAN). By selecting Sun StorageTek technologies and Sun Fire x64, Ultrasparc, and Coolthreads servers running the Solaris Operating System, the university is increasing its compute power on its backend database servers, implementing more power efficient and cost-effective application servers, and cost-effective SAS storage for their disaster recovery environment. The SAN solution, considered 'best of breed' by the university, will support services across the campus from ERP and distance learning to virtual systems for academics, and in the near future- storage services for the University's new medical school that is currently under construction. Sun Professional Services is assisting with the implementation. A Sun support agreement and training services are also included in the deal.
Dr. Georg Hager, HPC researcher, RRZE depratment of University of Erlangen
"Through our extensive testing with the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140
server, we found that despite the theoretical memory bandwidth of
single-socket UltraSPARC T2 and dual-socket T2 Plus processor systems to be
the same, the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor architecture delivers 30% more
memory bandwidth, which results in exceptionally high throughput
and scalability on Computational Fluid Dynamic applications, without
having to reoptimize any code. It just scaled across processor
sockets.
We found the 2 x UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors in the 1 Rack Unit high
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 Server to be equivalent in performance with
up to 6 dual-core AMD Opteron processors for CFD code. When the
power, space and administrative savings are considered, the Sun SPARC
Enterprise T5140 server offers exceptional value to any organization needing
maximum compute throughput and bandwidth in highly dense, power
efficient packaging.
We have characterized the UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors and systems to
be an 'IBM BlueGene on a chip' - and believe Sun's CoolThreads
technology to be a glimpse of what is to come in the commodity HPC
market."
Customer Blogs
See what real life customer have to say about the Sun Fire CoolThreads Servers as they install, deploy and test the systems. Apply here for a no cost, no risk 60 day trial of a Sun Fire CoolThreads server.
Application: MySQL Deployment on T5120 / T5220
Application: Sysbench Testing of UltraSPARC T2 vs 4 Socket Xeon
Application: Tomcat / MySQL / Smilehouse Workspace e-Commerce Solution
Application: Apache / MySQL / PHP
See other posts from this author covering tuning of the AMP stack:
Application: Java Message Passing
Application: Apache
Application: Java SAX XML Parsar
Application: Java based application
Applications: MySQL and HPC / NAS Parallel Benchmarks
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