Sun Goodness
Following on from my previous post about our experiences trying to get a Sun server, I got some great help from some SUN employees, not least Paul Jakma (of Quagga fame) and after filling in one form and posting a comment on Jonathan Schwartz’s blog, and telling a small fib about what country we’re in, the T2000 arrived yesterday.
Right now, I’m on study leave from work, but I’m in a few half-days and plan to steadily put the system through its paces. We went for the T2000, with 16Gb of memory, and prtdiag shows me a grand total of 32 logical processors, nice!
MB/CMP0/P0 0 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P1 1 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P2 2 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P3 3 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P4 4 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P5 5 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P6 6 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P7 7 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P8 8 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P9 9 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P10 10 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P11 11 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P12 12 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P13 13 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P14 14 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P15 15 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P16 16 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P17 17 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P18 18 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P19 19 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P20 20 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P21 21 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P22 22 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P23 23 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P24 24 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P25 25 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P26 26 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P27 27 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P28 28 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P29 29 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P30 30 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1 MB/CMP0/P31 31 1000 MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-T1
I’m going to have to install some more software (not least Apache!) and apply some tunnigs before it can be benchmarked properly, but already we’re getting some useful information. We’ve plugged the system into a metred Power Distribution Unit (PDU), to get a sense of how much current it draws, and while the meter is not granular enough to tell me what each port uses, here’s the graph of before/after plugging it in;
Plugging the T2000 in is almost exactly half-way through the graph, and you see a small spike there as the system controller comes online. The next ramp then is when I issued the poweron command and the whole system came onine. The power unit only measures in .1 AMPs, and the step correspondonds to an increase from 5.8 amps before plugging in the unit to 6.8 amps after it is fully powered on.
So, 1 Amp at 220 volts is 220 Watts +/1 10% given the accuracy of the unit. That’s pretty good for a beefy server. The Niagara platform is not the subject of SUN’s famous adds comparing their power usage to Dell’s – those were x64 servers – but still it’s good to see that power usage has been kept in trim. I remember when E450s would guzzle many times that number of watts. Our Dell 2850′s use about 290 Watts each +/- 10%, when they’re not busy, for the sake of comparison.
I’ll keep blogging our results from all of the testing and benchmarking as we go through it, and since I’m due to talk at the Irish System Administrators Guild this tuesday, I’ll probably include a lof of the results there too.
4 Replies to "Sun Goodness"
Technology on October 20, 2006
Hello, Really cool information…Thankyou!!!!
absolute pleasure to read it, instead of reading
all that crap which is floating about on blogs.
Looking forward to more posts from you…….
fzjxhmc on March 16, 2007
znakoms on April 27, 2007
Знакомтесь! – http://znakoms.org.ru
/~colmmacc/ » Blog Archive » Niagara vs ftp.heanet.ie Showdown on March 23, 2006
[...] As I’d previously blogged, one of the first things we were able to measure was the power usage of the machine. Much to my amazement, it remained at the original level (+/- 20%) of current draw for the duration of our tests, peaking at a mere 1.2 Amps, or about 290 Watts. This compares pretty favourably with our Dells, though I should add that the Dells both have more disks in their chassis than the T2000. [...]