Feature Story

Affordably fast email

New price/performance world record for Domino on Sun

Sun announces a new price/performance world record for the Domino benchmark running on a Sun Fire X4200 M2 server, and the first and only submission to the NotesBench Consortium on an AMD Opteron processor based system.

The new Domino 7 results demonstrate an outstanding achievement at $2.66 per user, 17,000 users, with an average response time of 496 milliseconds, and is now the overall World Record for price/performance for this benchmark.

With two AMD Opteron dual core 2.8 GHz 2220 processors and 16 GB of memory, running Red Hat Advanced Server Linux 4.0 64-bit, the 2 RU Sun Fire X4200 M2 server, along with two Sun StorageTek 3320 SCSI arrays each with twelve 146 GB, 15K rpm drives, is now the best low-cost solution for Lotus Domino 7 Messaging Server.

The system yielded 16 percent better dollars per user than the HP DL380G5 and 24 percent better $/user than the IBM X650, 56 percent better $/user than IBM p5-550Q, and 36 percent better $/user than HP DL580G3 in previous benchmarks. In addition, the Sun Fire X4200 M2 server provided six times better average response time over the IBM X3650 and almost two times better than the HP DL380G5 server.

Cost-effective performance

Sun and Lotus Software have an exceptional relationship and have been working together since 1989, providing innovative solutions for messaging and groupware to companies of all sizes. As partners we have joint engineering teams that are constantly working to enhance, tune, and validate Lotus Domino on Sun platforms to offer dependable, scalable, cost-effective solutions. Together, Sun and Lotus Software can lower operating costs, reduce network complexity, and improve organizational productivity. In fact, many of world's largest companies to deploy Lotus Solutions on the Sun platform.

Now the same dependability, scalability, and benefits are available to companies small and large on cost-effective, energy-efficient Sun AMD Opteron processor-based servers, without giving up performance. The impressive results show that a single Sun Fire X4200 M2 server can serve even a large organization by supporting 17,000 mail users. With CPU sockets capable of supporting quad-core processors, the system can scale to support even more users in the future, and the same components are used in Sun's larger x64 servers for even more scalability. Reliability features include redundant, hot-swappable components for maximum uptime and simplified services. And, for virtually unmatched flexibility, it also runs the Solaris OS, Linux, Windows, and VMware.

Making sound decisions

The NotesBench Web Access benchmark combines the simplicity of a Web browser with the power of an enterprise-class, full-featured application — giving Web browser users access to e-mail, calendar, group scheduling, to-do list, invitation and appointments. The NotesBench Consortium offers an objective way to evaluate the performance of different mail servers using different platforms running Lotus Domino. Sun is a long time member of the NotesBench Consortium, providing IT organizations with Notes capacity and performance information that is critical to making sound technology decisions. Sun has also completed benchmarks for UltraSPARC and UltraSPARC T1 servers with impressive results.

One stop shop for support

Worried about supporting Lotus Notes on a Sun platform? You don't need to be. Part of the Sun and Lotus Software alliance is the Technical Support Alliance Network (TSANet), which includes cooperative technical support procedures for one-stop access to Sun and Lotus engineers. With SunSpectrum Gold, SunSpectrum Platinum, or Sun Software Premium support, all you have to do is contact Sun and Sun engages Lotus on your behalf if necessary to resolve issues.

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