Posts tagged with Sun Microsystems
A Focus on the Economics of Data Centers
Posted by Guest Blogger in 11:13 am
(9 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
Loading ...Sun’s focus on Open Network Systems – from silicon and servers, to storage, networking, and software – continues to deliver unprecedented speed, simplicity, and savings to our customers. As part of our Open Network Systems strategy, we plan to add the new Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor to our existing portfolio of rackmount server and blade systems.
Sun understands our customers’ increased focus on the economics of their data centers as well as their desire to reduce overall complexity. Sun’s enhanced line of x64 servers and blades will take advantage of the greater performance, virtualization capabilities, and energy efficiency technologies powered by the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor. Sun systems powered by AMD’s newest processor will deliver up to 50 percent performance improvements compared to previous generation systems, giving our customers the performance and efficiency to handle demanding workloads with superior economics and energy efficiency.
Ready to scale with a single, consistent platform that spans from 2P to 8P servers, Sun’s x64 systems offer many choices for customers to realize breakthrough performance and unmatched virtualization capabilities, for enterprise and web applications, while supporting multiple operating systems . And with AMD Virtualization™ (AMD-V™) technology, the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor delivers greater virtual machine bandwidth than ever before.
Sun is committed to continued innovation along our x64 roadmap Companies small, medium and large are turning to Sun to quickly and easily upgrade, consolidate and virtualize their data centers to drive the overall efficiency and cost improvements their businesses demand.
As we optimize our new line of Sun x64 systems for the marketplace, stay tuned for more details on availability and pricing. Sun’s enhanced product lines and unique approach to Open Network Systems helps maximize the economics of computing by delivering maximum scale, efficiency, manageability, performance and sustainability. For more information, please visit www.sun.com/x64/amd today.
Dimitrios Dovas is Director of Systems Marketing, x64 Volume Systems at Sun. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein are based on Sun testing and have not been independently verified by AMD. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Silos are for grain storage
Posted by John Fruehe in 1:31 pm
I have been watching the media coverage after our competitor finally brought out their new products last week with an architecture strongly reminiscent of AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture. One thing I noticed is that as the week went on, more and more questions began to emerge. How can an overhaul of a platform be cost-efficient or easy to manage for customers? Especially in this day and age? Does it make sense to go for the highest rungs of performance when that could “break the bank” and arguably isn’t even really necessary for the most part?
In light of this debate, I also talked last week with Graham Lovell at Sun -- one of our technology partners. (You can watch a bit of our conversation below.) Graham is the director of Open Storage and let me tell you, he gets it. Their Amber Road product line has effectively addressed the important issues that customers can face in determining the storage component of a data center strategy – specifically the need to have highly scalable storage capacity on a high performing network - storage that is simple to manage and power efficient. Interesting how storage and server requirements are converging these days.
It seems the tide has been turning a bit in the storage world and there’s a lot more to consider now beyond the “classical” fail-safe back-up. There are synergies to be had by looking at the overall server/storage/software/virtualization equation. Sun’s delivered a product line that takes a building block approach to integrating the crucial storage element because that’s the direction the IT managers and the businesses they support are going. Simple as that. (Take a look at the massive Internet Archive project which is using AMD Opteron™ processor-based storage in a Sun Modular Datacenter.)
There will likely always be a place for the more traditional back office systems. But expensive implementations based on proprietary technology and that don’t readily mesh with the increasing need for quick, local, on-demand storage arguably aren’t the best fit given the direction our customers are going.
With more customers looking to virtualization to solve their IT needs, consolidation of storage is likely going to be that “critical first step” in getting the most out of a virtualized environment. Flexibility becomes more important and products like Sun’s Amber Road, built on AMD Opteron processor technology, help drive the right solutions.
Delivering technology that lets you build what you need, when you need it and do so with maximum efficiency -- that still sounds like the right way to go. I can’t see a future where that doesn’t make sense.
John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Don’t Be Fooled (Again)
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 12:17 pm
As April Fools’ Day approaches, I remember Pavlov’s dog and just how conditioned we all can be – particularly in terms of technology. Swap the “n” and “m” keys on someone’s keyboard or change the language setting on your friend’s Internet browser and see how long it takes your victim to figure out exactly what has happened. These changes are hard to catch because the assumptions you make when you sit at your computer – the location of keys or language settings of your software – aren’t meshing with reality. You have to challenge the validity of your assumptions before you can fully comprehend the situation.
If someone asked you to identify the top performing and most energy efficient server processors that have been shipping for the last four months – what would you say? If you answered Intel “Harpertown” or “Nehalem” processors you would be wrong. The 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor (code name “Shanghai”) has been shipping since November 2008, and has steadily gained solid marks in a variety of benchmarks, application performance evaluations, and power comparisons. More importantly, it’s gained the accolades of end customers who deploy AMD-based servers and rely not only on its performance, but on its energy saving properties and ease of management. Once again, assumptions and reality don’t always mesh.
Now you can accuse me of being an AMD “fanboy,” but the facts, not hype, support my position. Take a look at a couple of recent articles in Ars Technica and InfoWorld that make the same case I just did for “Shanghai” using third party performance and power evaluations.
One area where the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor really shines is virtualization. Currently the AMD-based Sun Fire X4600 MS server holds the record for the most virtual machines (114) on a server with VMware’s VMmark test running with VMware ESX 3.5U3, the currently shipping version of this hypervisor. A demo video posted on YouTube showcases the ability to perform a live migration between all generations of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors with VMware ESX 3.5U3 – even our new 6-core “Istanbul” product which is due to release in the second half of 2009. John Troyer from VMware’s VMTN Blog was a guest on the AMD Virtualization blog and he showcased the combined benefit of AMD-V™ Rapid Virtualization Indexing and VMware ESX 3.5 for scaling a web serving environment on a HP ProLiant DL585 G5 server running theSPECweb2005 benchmark with Apache web serving software. Now that’s a mouthful, but it’s a real-world scenario that could easily be taking place in enterprise data centers today.
Let’s add another dose of reality. According to the survey by Enterprise Strategy Group the average number of virtual machines per physical server is between 5 and 10 – a far cry from the record 114. Live migration, such as VMware’s VMotion, is a much in demand feature but it requires a specialized infrastructure and does not support heterogeneous (AMD and Intel) processor environments. And while VMmark and SPECweb2005 benchmarks provide a way to evaluate performance aspects of servers, they don’t take into consideration what are perhaps the two major decision factors for most IT groups – the cost of the system and its power consumption. These realities don’t make the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor any less of a virtualization powerhouse – but it does show you what happens when you go beyond easy assumptions. As technology providers we should have an obligation to provide you with both “hype” and facts.
The server industry is on the cusp of a huge hype cycle that will go on for the next few weeks and you will be pounded with information meant to drive buying decisions solely based on assumptions. My advice – let’s not be fooled into making decisions based on automatic conditioning. Otherwise we night end up with many errors we need to correct.
Margaret Lewis is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
The Great Benchmark Debate
Posted by John Fruehe in 5:39 pm
I read an interesting take from Forrester the other day about TPC benchmarks. Noel Yuhanna makes the case that “Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) benchmarks, once widely accepted as the standard DBMS benchmark, are becoming obsolete.” Why? He says:
“ First, all top-tier DBMS vendors such as […] are delivering high performance and scalability to support most large workloads. Second, TPC benchmarks no longer reflect the complex workloads of today’s real-world deployments. Third, customers that need high-end performance often prefer internal benchmarks to TPC benchmarks. Finally, virtualization, cloud computing, and database-as-a-service are changing the way customers deploy databases, and TPC does not address these architectures.” (from “TPC Benchmarks Don’t Matter Anymore: Features and Cost are Key Factors When Choosing a DBMS” by Noel Yuhanna with Mike Gilpin and David D’Silva, March 6, 2009, copyright Forrester Research)
This touches on a larger issue that we have blogged about before – we are seeing here at AMD that data center demands on the whole are changing. There is less stock being put into how a hardware or software product performs in a lab, and more emphasis on total cost of ownership and how they perform in real-life scenarios.
I want to be clear, there is a place for benchmarks, and we absolutely value how our products perform against the competition in a standardized setting. For instance, our 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ 8384 processor just set another world record virtualization score on the VMmark test (29.11@19 tiles on a Sun Fire X4600 M2 server running VMware ESX Server 3.5.0 hypervisor.) We also just set the record on the SPECweb2005 benchmark, measuring web server performance, with 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors in the four-socket 2RU x64 Sun Fire X4440 server.
However, both AMD and our OEM partners recognize that they are merely a component of the overall value equation. The days of saying that purchasing decisions can be simplified based on a single benchmark are long gone.
Benchmarks don’t always reflect real-world implementations but they have been accepted by and large by the industry as a good initial performance indicator. In fact, benchmark progression can even sometimes be interesting to track as multicore processing is crunching data at unprecedented speeds, resulting in some eye-popping results. AMD recognizes that there are always going to be applications that require the best raw performance. However, recent processor unit data from Mercury Research shows that high-end, performance processors are less than 10 percent of the market today. This tells us that customers ultimately buy on more than just raw performance. They look at how a system is optimized for software, what level of energy is it going to consume, how scalable is the hardware, and in today’s economic environment, price-performance and TCO are more critical than ever.
Whether it is a DBMS or not, Forrester raises a really good point here, and one that – at a minimum – is worth discussing, regardless of if you agree or disagree. There are many factors beyond TPC performance - reliability, manageabilty, security, performance to name a few – that impact a decision to buy and are spanning all enterprise computing environments. More specifically, how these factors impact the ongoing demands of your business (something we like to call the “workloads that matter”) is only going to become increasingly important.
John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
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