Sun, Fujitsu boost SPARC Enterprise server performance and virtualization capabilities

John Fowler, Executive Vice President, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, said:

"Our CMT servers with Solaris make it easy for customers to economize in the datacenter without sacrificing performance or efficiency. We've got massive density with virtualization already built-in - it's a great choice for both consolidation and the heavy lifting required by enterprise applications."

"Adoption of our CMT servers spans from start-ups to the large enterprise and we continue to see huge interest from customers looking to maximize the return on their infrastructure investments," said Noriyuki Toyoki, corporate vice president of Fujitsu. "With the enhancements we're announcing today, we will be able to offer customers even greater performance and virtualization capabilities."

CMT servers and the Solaris OS deliver increased performance, scalability and reliability with built-in virtualization capabilities at no additional cost. Combining new 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC T2 and T2 Plus processors with new LDoms 1.2 software provides additional virtualization and compute performance, simplifying management, reducing I/O bottlenecks and accelerating application response time.

LDoms 1.2 software, combined with the latest Solaris OS release, delivers breakthrough new features including:

- Built-in Configuration Tools - Provides simple and streamlined setup of Logical Domains with built-in command line configuration tools that enable customers to quickly begin using LDoms.

- CPU Power Management - Reduces system footprint through unique CPU power management, automatically powering off cores not in use.

- Jumbo Frames - Enhances network performance and efficiencies across network infrastructures with the support of jumbo frames, allowing customers to send more data at one time and reducing processing load requirements.

- Domain Mobility - Enables the dynamic migration of domains to accommodate increased resource demands, maintenance requirements, or to reduce energy consumption during low utilization periods via a single migration command.

- Built-in Recovery - Automatically backs up LDom configurations on disk in case of system corruption.

- Physical-to-Virtual Migration Tool - Allows customers to adopt LDoms infrastructures quickly when moving from existing legacy SPARC/Solaris systems to CMT systems.

SPARC Enterprise servers with 1.6 GHz processors and solaris deliver outstanding performance:

To date, SPARC Enterprise servers have posted more than 60 industry-leading performance results. New records with the 1.6 GHz processors and the Solaris OS announced today include:

Two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark:

The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server (4 processors/32 cores/256 threads) set a four-processor world record on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark with 4,720 SAP SD Benchmark users for all systems running the SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application (Unicode). The SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments and demonstrates the performance of competitive systems running order- and invoice-processing workloads. Running the SAP solution with Oracle Database, the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server surpassed the competing IBM System 550 server with four POWER6 processors by 26% with 3,752 SAP SD Benchmark users. This result also highlights the optimal performance of SAP ERP on the Solaris OS and the seamless multilingual support available for SPARC Enterprise systems running SAP applications.

SPECjAppServer2004:

The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server, running seven instances of Oracle WebLogic Server using Solaris Containers technology, outperformed all other competitive solutions with a single-node on the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark with 7,661.16 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard. This benchmark captures the end-to-end application and database performance of a vendor's solutions and highlights the scalability of the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server in both application and database server roles. Running the latest versions of the Solaris 10 OS and Java Server software backed by Oracle Database 11g, the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server delivered 74% better performance than the Intel Xeon-based HP DL580 G5 solution and delivered a 21% improvement over the previous 1.4GHz-based SPARC Enterprise score.