Java Solaris Communities About Sun How to Buy United States Worldwide

Sun Open Performance Contest

Try It! Risk-Free
Try Sun Products Free for 60 Days » Apply Online
» What's New

Sun Open Performance Contest Winners Blog About Sun Products
Note: Sun's Open Performance Contest ended June 30, 2007


Winner - Sun Fire T2000 Server

Jani Luostarinen, Smilehouse Oy

"We have a pretty good picture on how good Workspace and Tomcat perform on clustered environments so we wanted to compare it against Sun T2000. Sun's hardware costs about twice as much as the cluster so we were quite excited to see if it could outperform it".

Test scenario consists of virtual users who perform certain actions in web shop. Each user opens the front page and after that five random product or product group pages. User waits from 10 to 15 seconds between each request. Test has a ramp up time of 120 seconds which means that all virtual users are using the shop after that period of time. We assumed that 90% of request should be served within 2 seconds. Each request consists of page and all the embedded objects (images, scripts etc.). T2000 was attached to benchmarking server with 1 Gb/s dedicated link.

Read more about it!

Winner - Sun Ultra 40 M2

Carlos Eduardo Montoya Cortes, Proyectos Especiales

Testing consisted of 3D performance in rendering with 3DMark, Spec and custom-made 3D image with advanced illumination + Mental Ray + HDRI + Quality textures.

The purpose was not to provide a hard number comparison (we do not have, like the mayority of latin-america companies, a quality workstation) but to understand the potential benefits of having a workstation.

"Ultra 40 M2 results had very obvious performance gains over our current clon systems - 81.3% performance gains over our test base computer." -Carlos Eduardo Montoya Cortes

Read More - Overview (in Spanish)
Read More - Test (in Spanish)
View - Video (in Spanish)

Winner - Sun Fire T2000 Server

Dave Hall, Dave Hall Consulting

Dave obtained a Sun Fire T2000 through the Sun Try and Buy Program for testing ubuntu 6.06LTS (aka dapper drake) and some PHP based web apps. He wanted to play with Solaris and some other OSes on the box as he was interested in the Solaris brand.

"I wanted to take Jonathan Schwartz up on his offer of running ubuntu on the box and getting to keep it. As I consider myself a Linux system admin of medium level competence I thought it should be easy enough. How wrong I was". -Dave Hall, Dave Hall Consulting, Australia

Read More

Winner - Sun Fire X4200 Server

Tweakers - Arjen van der Meijden

Sun UltraSparc T1 vs. AMD Opteron! Tweakers used two Sun machines in this test: a T2000 and an X4200. Both are 2U rack mounted servers, with the processor being the most significant difference: the T2000's heart is an UltraSparc T1 with eight cores clocked at 1HGz, while the X4200 is fitted with two dualcore Opteron 280 processors at 2.4GHz.

Read About It!

Winner - Sun Fire T1000 Server

Karl Nyberg - Grebyn Corporation

Grebyn's evaluation consisted of a T1000 system obtained from their Try and Buy Program using a constructive approach to integer factorization in the RSA Factoring Challenge as the load under test. Comparisons are made with execution on a Dell PowerEdge Pentium IV and a MicroCenter PowerSpec Athlon64, including performance, acquisition and operational cost.

Read About It!

Winner - Sun Fire T2000 Server

Mark Martin

Mark set out to find out a number of different thing; was basing the framework on SEDA a good choice?; how much difference was there between a single core, high frequency chip and multi-core/multi-thread (e.g. an AMD Opteron and the Ultrasparc T1); how much difference is there between the 4 core and 8 core UltraSparc T1 CPU's? and is the T2000 relegated to serving out static content for web servers, or can you actually perform some computation?

"For reasons I can't even begin to fathom myself, I've always been a fan of the SPARC based Sun platforms. I initially had to sort of bear with Solaris in my development projects on the platform - although I've come to absolutely love Solaris 10 with the major improvements found here." -Mark Martin

Read about Mark's results!

Winner - Sun Fire T2000 Server

Dirk Wetter, Dr. Wetter IT Consulting

Dr. Wetter IT Consulting ran a performance comparison, mainly disk and network I/O, and a variety of application benchmarks, some locally like big compiler jobs and others like LDAP and WWW over the network. The competitors were Solaris 10 HW 6/06 on one side and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on the other side.

"The T2000 hardware made a good and solid impression as it is almost usual from Sun." "Solaris 10 U2 – as expected – installed without any problems on the T2000 and the new features especially the Zettabyte file system brought Solaris another step forward." "The strength besides the low energy consumption is the multiprocessing / threading technology. The good thing is that you (still) can try before you buy, that should help you to make a purchase decision without risk." -Dr. Dirk Wetter

Read more

Winner - Sun Ultra 20 M2 Workstation

John Poole, Geek Patrol

Geek Patrol worked with the Sun Ultra 20 M2 workstation, running Solaris 10 and Windows XP. After spending some quality time with Solaris 10 running on a Sun Ultra 20 M2, Geek Patrol ported Geekbench 2006 to Solaris for both 32- and 64-bit x86-based processors. Geek Patrol simulated processor and memory intensive tasks using Geekbench 2006.

"Solaris outperformed Windows in almost every benchmark category, even outperforming Windows dramatically in some specific tests (such as some of the floating point benchmarks). If you're working with processor-intensive tasks, Solaris might be the operating system for you." -John Poole

Read more

Winner - Sun Ultra 40

Nik Clayton, CRF Consulting LTD

"A VMWare approach, allowing you to run multiple concurrent different operating systems on the same hardware instance may prove to be more useful in the long run, even if the administration overhead is perhaps a little higher." -Nik Clayton

Read more

Winner - Sun Fire T2000 Server

Mitch Theys, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago

"T2000 is an excellent machine to build big parallel computing clusters or big data centers. If we look at the SWaP results is clear that an array of T2000 machines will give us a powerful supercomputer and we will make big savings in power consumption and space." -Mitch Theys

Read about UIC Try and Buy performance test, computers, timelines, results and conclusions

Winner - Sun Fire T1000 Server

Charles Lamb, Sleepycat Software

"Our data center electricity bills cross my desk every month so I'm glad to see Sun pushing hard on this issue. The T2000 and T1000 that I tested both met or exceeded what Sun's data sheet says they consume." -Charles Lamb

Sleepycat blogs about T2000/T1000 Try and Buy

Winner - Sun Fire T2000 Server

Jon Emmons, Plymouth State University

"The Sun Fire T2000 has certainly proven its worth. Some may be put off by the relatively low processor speed (the model tested was a mere 1GHz) but it is clearly not an impediment. The 8 core CPU seems to be up to the challenge and I'm sure with additional tuning I'm sure they'd scream." -Jon Emmons

Read about life after coffee!

Winner - Sun Fire T2000 Server

Thomas Rampelberg

About Thomas

What He is Running:

MySQL and Apache (replacing 14 HP DL 145's with 2 T2000's)

"As it is, DigiTar will save between 50-75% of our MySQL operations costs by moving our mission-critical MySQL operations to a pair of T2000s. Overall, it will help us eliminate the need for 8 HP DL145 G2s, not too mention drastically simplify our HA environment and increase our possible capacity by a factor of 2." -DigiTar WhitePaper, Thomas Rampelberg

Winner - Sun Fire T2000 Server

Stefan Rubner

About Stephan

What He is Running:

Apache Bench 2.0.55 requesting different number of static and dynamic pages using connections with and without keep-alive feature over a gigabit line

"If you're running a web site, get rid of any old hardware you might still own. The Proliant clearly was no match for the other two. No (big) surprises there, I'd say. If your web sites use static pages only, you may want a Sun Fire T2000 to serve them. The overall performance is better than what the really well equipped Lynx server provided." -Stefan Rubner

Winner - Sun Fire T2000 Server

Colm MacCarthaigh

Niagara Benchmark Updates

"What I couldn't wait for though, is to communicate the effect some single changes in our benchmarking setup have achieved. A few days ago I raved about the 5700 requests per second I was getting out of the Niagara box. Turns out that was a load of crap, here's what I'm getting now;"
Requests per second:    15298.68 [#/sec] (mean)

And here’s what an active HEAnet is pushing;

Requests per second:    4445.26 [#/sec] (mean)

* ftp.heanet.ie is currently running on a Dell Poweredge 2650 and a Poweredge 7250. coroebus.heanet.ie acting as a web/ftp/rsync server, and canyonero.heanet.ie acting as an rsync and content mirroring client.
Coroebus.heanet.ie:
Coroebus.heanet.ie is a dual 1.5Ghz Itanium, with 32Gb of RAM. It has dual 73gb 10,000 RPM scsi mirrored system disks, and a 4x 36Gb 15,000 RPM scsi RAID-O to cache the most often requested content. Coroebus currently has a quad Gigabit ethernet uplink.
Canyonero.heanet.ie:
Canyonero.heanet.ie is a 2Ghz Xeon, with 4Gb of RAM. It has dual 18Gb 10,000 RPM scsi disks. Canyonero currently has a a single Gigabit ethernet uplink.

Those were terrific results Colm - are they too good to be true???

More Try and Buy Blogs

Applications: Plone and Zope

"Basically, the T2000 looks to have about 4 times the throughput of an Athlon 2600 for compute intenstive primarily integer computations."

Applications: Apache, PHP, Java Virtual Machine with XML and XSLT processing

"And again it's clear that if you're running a website with a lot of traffic, the T2000 is an excellent choice. Your visitors won't get the fastest possible response time, but you'll handle far more visitors for the same amount of dollar investment than if you're buying the other machines I've tested so far."

Application: Berkeley DB Java Edition

"The Niagara is an interesting box from a developers point of view because it offers a large number of strands (virtual CPUs) at a relatively low price point for concurrency testing. From a data center point of view, this box could be interesting for people who may be thinking of upgrading older boxes (like the Xeon used in my tests) where there are more cycles/watt in the Niagara than an older Intel machine."

Application: Oracle 9iR2

"On average it took only 29% as long for the jobs to run on the T2000!....The lower energy consumption and lower heat output would be a welcome change in our already taxed data center and the compact 2U size should be an easy fit in any rack. "

Applications: In-House scientific computing codes

"The performance of the system scales up to 32 parallel tasks in MPI and OpenMP. We can deduce that the underlying hardware supports 32 parallel tasks in an independent way. Although four threads run on a single core and these threads share an integer unit, the pipelining of the unit hides the memory latency efficiently. "

Application: Apache and PHP

"A single core server would only be able to process one transaction at a time, so 12,800 transactions at roughly 3 seconds per transaction would take 38,400 seconds, or 10 hours, 40 minutes. The Sun T2000 server was able to process all 12,800 transactions in 10 minutes. This is one very high performance server."

Application: Tomcat

"The Sun T2000 (8 cores, 16 GB) still has enough resources to install another 4 instances of the application server. This is, what we were looking for!!"

Application: MySQL

"As it is, DigiTar will save between 50-75% of our MySQL operations costs by moving our mission-critical MySQL operations to a pair of T2000s. Overall, it will help us eliminate the need for 8 HP DL145 G2s, not too mention drastically simplify our HA environment and increase our possible capacity by a factor of 2."

Application: MySQL

"The stress test seemed to exhaust the limits of the HP Proliant. The T2000 in absolutely no way mimicked the behavior of its 'colleague in silicon'....After the test, it was clear to me what a performance monster the T2000 is."

Application: PostgreSQL

"I never thought I'd see the day, but I seem to have found a computer that is faster than anything I need at the moment."

Applications: Web Server with PHP

"T2000 is over 4x faster than IBM dual Xeon 2.8GHz!"

Applications: Apache, PHP and MySQL

"All in all I like the results of that test for they show the Sun Fire T2000 to be a quite robust platform using a kernel with good scheduling qualities."

Applications: Web services with SOAP, Xfire, Jetty and Woodstock XML parser

"The T2000 is a great machine. I would recommend it to anyone doing high volume web services...more than 5 times the througput of my Intel 2GHz Dell. ...if you do have spiked loads, it can definitely handle the extra connections."

Applications: Apache, PHP and MySQL

"It would seem that WPopac's combination of, um, large MySQL databases with high-volume Apache/PHP should be an ideal fit for the T2000's big RAM space and support for high numbers of parallel threads."

Application: MySQL

"How does MySQL perform on a sunfire.......outperforming a x86-64 machine by 2.5 times in one case."

See All
Before You Buy
Contact Sun
 

Resources
Program Rules
FAQs
Order Status
Initiate a Return
Contact About Sun News & Events Employment Site Map Privacy Terms of Use Trademarks Copyright 1994-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.