Sun Fire X4200 M2 Server

Since the introduction of the Sun Fire X4100 server, powered by two AMD Opteron Model 256 processors, operating at 3GHz, Sun Microsystems has effectively lowered the bar for entry into the enterprise computing arena by dominating the price/performance metric of the TPC-H benchmark at 100GB scale factor. Today, tracking multi-core processor technology trends, the Sun Fire X4200 M2 server, outfitted with two dual-core AMD Opteron Model 2222SE processors, running at the same 3GHz clock frequency, more than doubles the TPC-H performance of 4132QphH@100GB (US$4.61/QphH@100GB, available 06/23/06) posted by the Sun Fire X4100 server. The Sun Fire X4200 M2 server produced the result of 8587QphH@100GB, utilizing SybaseIQ database manager and used RAID-protected database storage to emulate real-world enterprise datacenter requirements.

Available on 05/25/2007, the Sun Fire X4200 M2 server, running Solaris 10, the world's leading enterprise operating system, demonstrated the best price-performance among all 2-socket/4-core TPC-H results at 100GB scale factor. The new world record result of US$5.29/QphH@100GB is second only to the price/performance score of the aforementioned Sun Fire X4100 solution, which used less data storage. Additionally, Sun's new offering costs less than half of the Dell PE 2900 solution (US$11.44/QphH@100GB, 10476QphH@100GB, available 07/10/06), which did not even use the highly available storage configuration.

The TPC-H benchmark was established by the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) to demonstrate the performance of Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing (BIDW) and Decision Support Systems (DSS). TPC-H is non-industry-specific and allows customers to evaluate the performance of various DSS systems in conjunction with a standard database size, referred to as the scale factor (SF). The benchmark measures the combined performance of a particular database manager on a specific computer system at the scale factors including 100GB, 300GB, 1000GB and 3000GB, and reports the composite TPC-H Query-per-Hour (QphH) performance metric, as well as the price/performance, which is the ratio of total cost of solution, consisting of hardware, software and three year maintenance costs to the QphH.

• Executive Summary Report

• Full Disclosure Report

The NotesBench R6iNotes benchmark is used for performance evaluation of hardware solutions offered by various vendors. It simulates active e-mail users accessing their IBM Lotus Domino mailboxes via standard web browser where each simulated user periodically sends, retrieves, and deletes a specified number of e-mail messages.

The Sun Fire X4200 M2, equipped with two AMD Opteron 2220 processors and 32GB of memory, delivered industry leading price/performance results on the above benchmark by running Lotus Domino 7.0 server software on Red Hat Enterprise Server Linux 4.0 (64-bit) operating system. Configured with 3 Lotus Domino partitions, the Sun Fire X4200 M2 server was able to support 17,000 simulated users with an average response time of less than half a second (496 ms). Moreover, the entire solution that also included two Sun StorageTek 3320 SCSI JBOD storage arrays, only cost US$2.66 per user, which signifies the overall price/performance World Record for this benchmark and is 16% less expensive than the closest competitor.

Sun is a prominent player in the Lotus Domino market and has been using this benchmark for many years to guide customers to more sensible solutions based on Sun's hardware. This result is not different as it demonstrates a frugal yet innovative solution that utilizes x64 architecture and marks the first and only published result on an Opteron-based server.

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The Sun Fire X4200 M2 server is the world's fastest 2-socket x86 system on the floating point suite of the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark. Based on real world applications, the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark measures the performance of the processor, memory and compiler on the tested system in two different ways. In the first case, the computer is given a single task, and the time it takes to complete that task is measured. In the second case, multiple copies of the benchmark are run simultaneously on the computer and, again, the amount of time it takes to accomplish the tasks is measured. As a result two scores are produced: SPECfp2000 and SPECfp_rate2000..

The Sun Fire X4200 M2 server, driven by the next-generation of the AMD Opteron processor, in combination with Solaris 10 OS and Sun Studio 11 software, trumps the competition with SPECfp2000 score of 3515 and SPECfp_rate2000 result of 119, setting two new x86 world records in 2-socket category. These results surpass the Intel "Woodcrest"-based HP DL360 G5 server SPECfp_rate2000 score of 84.7 by over 40% and the best Itanium2-based Bull NovaScale 3045 server SPECfp_2000 score of 3017 by 16.5%.

• Press Release

• Floating Point Benchmark Results

• Floating Point Throughput Benchmark Results

The Sun Fire X4200 M2 server with two Dual-Core AMD Opteron model 2220SE processors, running Solaris 10 OS and Sun Studio 11 software is the world's fastest 2 socket system running 4 threads. This winning combination allowed Sun Fire X4200 M2 server to surpass the competition by posting 2chip/4core/4thread SPECompM2001 score of 13222 and improve the previously posted SPECompM2001 score of 10964 by over 20%. The industry-standard SPEC OMP benchmark is used to compare the performance of shared memory servers executing compute-intensive scientific applications and consists of medium and large problem sets.

• Press Release

• Benchmark Results

Sun has established an early and commanding lead, taking top honors in 2 metric (SPECint2006, SPECfp2006) of the new SPECcpu2006 benchmark, by using Sun Studio 11 and Solaris 10 on AMD Opteron processor-based Sun Fire X4200 system.

The SPEC CPU2006 Benchmark which is more than 4 times larger than its predecessor, now provides a broader variety of workloads and better real-world applicability of the results. This new benchmark exercises a computer's processor, memory architecture, and compilers on a variety of compute intensive workloads, including protein sequencing, MPEG-4 decoding, XML processing, fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, and speech recognition.

Utilizing the most advanced features, such as auto-parallelism technology, of Sun Studio 11 software, Sun's freely available development tool for Solaris and Linux Operating Systems, the Sun Fire X4200 server, produced a SPECint2006 results of 13.3 and SPECfp2006 score of 14.7. Demonstrating Sun's commitment to innovation, this best-in-class system surpassed the Intel-based HP ProLiant DL380 G4 server as well as bested the competing HP ProLiant DL385 server.

• Press Release

• SPECint2006 Benchmark Results

• SPECfp2006 Benchmark Results

Lowering the bar for entry into the enterprise computing arena, Sun Fire X4200 server has demonstrated world record price/performance and is the first ever 2-way server to claim a performance world record on the 300GB TPC-H benchmark. The TPC-H benchmark was established by the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) to demonstrate the performance of Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing (BIDW) and Decision Support Systems (DSS). TPC-H is non-industry-specific and allows customers to evaluate the performance of various DSS systems in conjunction with a standard database sizes, referred to as the scale factor (SF). The benchmark measures the combined performance of a particular database manager on a specific computer system at the scale factors including 100GB, 300GB, 1000GB and 3000GB, and reports the composite TPC-H Query-per-Hour (QphH) performance metric, as well as the price/performance, which is the ratio of total cost of solution, consisting of hardware, software and three year maintenance costs to the QphH.

The Sun Fire X4200 server, running Solaris 10, the world's leading enterprise operating system, produced the result of 4936.2 QphH@300GB using a RAID protected database to emulate the real-world enterprise datacenter requirements that dictate the use of highly available storage for all production environments. The real highlight of the DSS and BIDW capabilities of Sun's solution, available 06/23/2006, came with the new price/performance world record established by the Sun Fire X4200 server, powered by two AMD Opteron Model 256 processors and running the SybaseIQ database manager. This combination resulted in the best price/performance of US$6.29/QphH@300GB for any system at the 300 GB scale factor, improving the previous world record result by over 45%. Contributing to the low price/performance was the efficient storage configuration, requiring only 1 disk for every 5 that the competition had to use, which translates into simplified system administration, lesser risk of disk failures and reduced total cost of ownership.

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The Sun Fire X4200 server, powered by the fastest single-core AMD Opteron Model 256 processors, sets two new world records on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark, highlighting the performance using the Java Platform, Standard Edition software, release 5.0_08. This benchmark measures the performance of an application tier based on the order processing in a wholesale supplier application, implemented using server-side Java. It also measures the performance of CPUs and memory subsystem, producing two equally important metrics-total system throughput (SPECjbb2005 bops) and JVM scalability (SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM). The Sun Fire X4200 server running the Solaris(tm) 10 Operating System showed record performance for 2-socket, 2-way systems:

• New high score of 38,090 SPECjbb2005 bops for throughput
• New high score of 32,018 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM for JVM scaling

• Press Release

• Total System Throughput Benchmark Results

• JVM Scalability Benchmark Results

Based on real world applications, the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark measures the performance of the processor, memory and compiler on the tested system across two benchmark suites. One suite measures and compares compute-intensive integer performance and the other measures and compares floating point performance. The Sun Fire X4200 server, equipped with two AMD Opteron(TM) Model 256 processors and running SuSE Linux (SLES9), overthrows other 2-CPU x86 Linux servers with SPECint_rate2000 result of 46.9 and SPECfp_rate2000 result of 55.6.

• Press Release

• SPECint_rate2000 Benchmark Result

• SPECfp_rate2000 Benchmark Result

The combination of the Solaris 10 OS and Sun(TM) Studio 11 software enabled the Sun Fire X4200 server, equipped with two AMD Opteron(TM) Model 256 processors, to beat all other 2-CPU x86 servers on SPECfp_rate2000 benchmark with a score of 56.6. This result easily trumps the SPECfp_rate2000 score of 32.9, which was set by a competing Intel Xeon-based HP ProLiant DL360 G4p server, by 72%.

• Press Release

• Benchmark Results

The Sun Fire X4200 server is the fastest single processor x86 server with a SPECfp2000 score of 2471. The combination of AMD Opteron Model 256 CPU, Solaris 10 OS and Sun Studio 11 software allowed Sun's server to surpass the competition on the SPECfp2000 benchmark, which highlights the floating point capabilities of the processor, memory and compiler on the system under test.

• Press Release

• Benchmark Results

The Sun Fire X4200 server set three new x86 world records on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark (bops/JVM) with the following operating systems: the Solaris 10 OS, Microsoft Windows 2003 Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. This benchmark emulates the design of real-world, server-side Java applications and provides an accurate reflection of the business logic and objects, while stressing the implementation of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the scalability of the system's processors and memory. The Sun Fire X4200 server, equipped with two multi-core Opteron Model 285 processors, posted the single JVM instance result of 49,097 business operations per second (bops) with the throughput of 49,097 bops/JVM, using the Solaris 10 operating system (OS).

Since the benchmark stresses overall JVM performance, producing two equally important metrics - total system throughput (bops) and JVM scalability (bops/JVM), it was used to demonstrate that Java HotSpotTM Server Virtual Machine can deliver outstanding results and optimized performance regardless of the underlying OS. An identical server configuration was used to conduct two more SPECjbb2005 tests using the same JVM, version J2SE 5.0_06. The first test was conducted under Microsoft Windows 2003 Server OS and produced the score of 47,437 bops with the throughput of 47,437 bops/JVM. The second test used Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 OS and posted the score of 43,076 bops, with the throughput of 43,076 bops/JVM. The Red Hat Linux and Microsoft Windows-based results are the new World Records for the respective Operating Systems.

The latest addition to the Sun Fire x64 server family, designed for enterprise applications in areas such as business transaction processing and server side Java, the Sun Fire X4200 server using Sun's HotSpot JVM, proved to be a stellar performer, outrunning the previous best result by 9%.

• Solaris Benchmark Results

• Windows Benchmark Results

• Linux Benchmark Results

• Press Release

Based on real world user applications, the SPEC CPU2000 suite measures the integer and floating point performance of the processor, memory and compiler on the tested system, effectively providing a comparative measure of compute intensive performance across the widest range of hardware. On the floating point throughput component of this benchmark, the multi-core Sun Fire X4200 server demonstrates a superior SPECfp_rate2000 score of 82.4. This beats the single and dual-core SPECfp_rate2000 results of 48.2 and 52.6, posted by Xeon-based HP ML570 server, by over 70% and 56% respectively. This new record underscores the architectural advantages of AMD's Direct Connect architecture and the latest Sun Studio 11 compiler software.

• Benchmark Results

This industry standard SPEC benchmark is used to compare the performance of shared memory servers executing compute-intensive scientific applications and consists of medium and large problem sets. The Sun Fire X4200 server, with two AMD Opteron 285SE processors, posted a record SPECompM2001 score of 10,964 and surpassed the most recent IBM POWER5+-based p5 520 result of 8,174 by over 34% on the medium size problem set.

• Benchmark Results

The Sun Fire X4200 server, equipped with two AMD Opteron Model 254 processors and running Zeus Web Server, has demonstrated World Record performance in secure web serving among all 2-processor systems, as of September 12, 2005. The Sun Fire X4200 server delivered a result of 3,158 conforming connections on SPECweb99_SSL benchmark and outperformed the comparably equipped Xeon and Itanium2-based systems.

• Benchmark Results

• Press Release

On the SPEC OMPM2001 benchmark, which is used to compare the performance of shared memory servers executing compute-intensive scientific applications, the Sun Fire X4200 server with two SINGLE-CORE AMD Opteron 254 processors produced a score of 7,612 and set the new World Record in 2-thread category. This benchmark represents a collection of applications that are used in high-energy physics, weather modeling, computational chemistry, mechanical design and several other areas. Not surprisingly, Sun's 20 years of Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) systems expertise in combination with the Solaris 10 OS features like Memory Placement Optimization (MPO) and Sun Studio 10 compiler software, allowed Sun's server to shine on this HPC (High-Performance Computing) workload.

• Benchmark Results

• Press Release