Tired of Sun - Make the Move to Intel and Save BIG BUCKS
In a March 2010 study, Principled Technologies performed an analysis that compared the total cost of ownership (TCO) and performance results of the Dell PowerEdge R910 server against the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server and the results were shocking.
Before determing any total costs of ownership, a baseline had to be established. In the analysis, the industry standard SPECjbb2005 benchmark was used to determine the amount of Dell R910's servers that would equal the Sun T5440's. The SPECjbb2005 (Java Server) Benchmark is SPEC's (www.spec.org) benchmark for evaluating the performance of server side Java. Systems integrators and end users can use the benchmark to evaluate performance of hardware and software aspects of Java Virtual Machine (JVM) servers. Hardware vendors can use SPECjbb2005 to analyze their platform’s scalability when running Java applications. Software vendors can use it to evaluate the efficiency of their JVMs, just-in-time compilers (JITs), garbage collectors, thread implementations, and operating systems. The test is measured in "business operations per second", or bops, with a higher number being better.
For this test, Principled Technologies used the most current published benchmark for the Sun T5440 (http://www.spec.org/osg/jbb2005/results/res2009q3/jbb2005-20090720-00753.html) which equaled a SPECjbb2005 bops of 841,380. Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 consisted of 4 x 8 core UltraSPARC T2 Plus CPUs running at 1,596Mhz for a total of 32 cores. The server had 64x 4GB DDR2-800 FBDIMMS and used 1x 146GB SCSI Disk to run the benchmark on OpenSolaris 2009.06.
For the Dell R910, Principled Technologies ran the SPECjbb2005 benchmark and came up with a score of 1,868,708 bops. The Dell server was built with 4 x Intel Xeon X7560, 2.26 GHz CPUs, each with 8 cores for a total of 32 cores. The server had 32x 4GB PC3-8500 FBDIMMS and used 2 x 73GB SAS Disks to run the benchmark on Red Hat Linux 2.54.
Right away, we see that the Dell R910 has a higher bops benchmark, so when you extend that difference times an estimated real-life workload of 18.5 million bops we are able to determine that 10 x Dell R910 servers would equal 22 x Sun T5440's. This ratio is what the TCO numbers are calculated using with one exception. Since OpenSolaris is open source and used primarily for developers, the cost for Solaris 10 was substituted in its place.
As the analysis begins compiling the total cost of ownership by reviewing the hardware costs, the savings quickly become clear as the 10 Dell servers come in at just over $400,000 while the Sun servers come in at $3.5M. Add to the equation per processor, per server Oracle licenses, training and other miscellaneous costs, the total acquisition cost between the two servers comes with Dell at $785k and Sun at $4.3M. For the second half of the total cost of ownership, the analysis reviewed the cost to operate both servers. Principled Technologies determined the database software support for 10 servers would equal $462,000, so with Sun requiring 22 servers, the cost to support the databases on Sun servers was more than double the Dell servers running on Intel CPUs. The additional operating costs of power and cooling, data center costs and server administration mostly revolved around the reduction of servers required in a Dell solution versus the Sun solution therefore overall the 3 year operating costs came in at $587k for the Dell solution versus $1.4M for the Sun server solution.
When you combine the acquisition costs and the operating costs together to create a 3 year Total Cost of Ownership, you see that the TCO for using 10 x Dell PowerEdge R910 servers, based on the Intel Xeon X7560 processor, is 76% less than using 22 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Servers.
It is pretty clear that the Dell servers are a more cost efficient option, but why is the Dell server so much better performing? The answer is primarily because the Dell R910's were using Intel's Xeon 7500 Architecture. 
The Xeon 7500 architecture has enabled servers in the Intel/AMD space (often referred to as "x86") to achieve levels of performance never before imagined. The Xeon 7500 architecture enhancements include:
•Nehalem uarchitecture
•8-cores per CPU
•24MB Shared L3 Cache
• 4 Memory Buffers per CPU
•16 DIMM slots per CPU for a total of 64 DIMM slots supporting up to 1 terabyte of memory (across 4 CPUs)
•72 PCIe Gen2 lanes
•Scaling from 2-256 sockets
•Intel Virtualization Technologies
Additional Features
Since the Xeon 6500/7500 chipsets are modeled off the familiar Nehalem uarchitecture, there are certain well-known features that are available. Both Turbo Boost and HyperThreading have been added to the and will provide users for the ability to have better performance in their high-end servers (shown left to right below.)
Memory
Probably the biggest winner of the features that Intel’s bringing with the Nehalem EX announcement is the ability to have more memory and bigger memory pipes.
Each CPU will have 4 x high speed “Scalable Memory Interconnects” (SMI’s) that will be the highways for the memory to communicate with the CPUs. As with the existing Nehalem architecture, each CPU has a dedicated memory controller that provides access to the memory. In the case of the Nehalem EX design, each CPU has 4 pathways that each have a Scalable Memory Buffer, or SMB, that provide access to 4 memory DIMMs. So, in total, each CPU will have access to 16 DIMMs across 4 pathways. Based on the simple math, a server with 4 CPUs will be able to have up to 64 memory DIMMs. Some other key facts:
• it will support up to 16GB DDR3 DIMMs
•it will support up to 1TB with 16GB DIMMS
•it will support DDR3 DIMMs up to 1066MHz, in Registered, Single-Rank, Dual-Rank and Quad-Rank flavors.
Another important note is the actual system memory speed will depend on specific processor capabilities (see reference table below for max SMI link speeds per CPU):
•6.4GT/s SMI link speed capable of running memory speeds up to 1066Mhz
•5.86GT/s SMI link speed capable of running memory speeds up to 978Mhz
•4.8GT/s SMI link speed capable of running memory speeds up to 800Mhz
Here’s a great chart to reference on the features across the individual CPU offerings, from Intel:
Finally, take a look at some comparisons between the Nehalem EX (Xeon 7500) and the previous generation, Xeon 7400:
With this information, it is easy to see how Intel's Xeon 7500 helped the Dell R910 solution outperform the Sun equivalent. I want to commend Principled Technologies for a very well done analysis. If you would like to have a similar analysis done, please contact your Corus360 rep, or contact me at khouston AT Corus360.com. For a copy of the analysis performed by Principled Technologies, please visit http://www.principledtechnologies.com/
Kevin Houston is Vice President of Servers and Virtualization for Corus360 and also maintains BladesMadeSimple.com - a blog focused on all things related to blade servers.
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