Data Center Strategies for the CIO
Small servers (four processors and under)
Gold Award:
SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers
The new servers announced October 9, 2007 are the first to use UltraSparc T2 processor with multithreading technology for better virtualization capabilities and web scale. The servers hold the power of 64 virtual systems in a single server, making them ideally suited for at tier 1 and 2 workloads in the enterprise space.
SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers double the number of processing threads and increase floating point capabilities eight times over the previous generation, and are the first servers to integrate 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology and I/O directly on the chip. The SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 are capable of web serving over four times the number of users, in 1/4 the space at nearly 1/4 the cost, with reportedly six times better performance per watt compared to competitive UNIX/RISC-based servers.
The systems have a motherboard with a single UltraSparc T2 CPU comprised of eight processing cores, PCI-Express I/O functionality and two-10Gb XAUI ports. The 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2 processor also obtained the best single-JVM single chip results on the SPECjbb2005 server-side Java benchmark.
To make life easier for IT staff, the same chassis, power supplies, disks and fans are used on the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel Corp. processor-based variants of the servers, and the remote management capabilities are compatible with Sun's x64 family of servers, with standardized interfaces that are backwards compatible with the previous generation of SPARC remote management facilities.
To boot, the servers also provide maximum energy efficiencies and the best performance per watt on the market, and operate the free and open source Solaris operating systems. They include built-in open source, free virtualization capabilities with Solaris Containers and Logical Domains (LDoms) that help keep IT costs low.
The SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers started shipping October 17 with pricing starting at $13,995.