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SPARC Product Directory
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| This article looks at
simple hardware upgrade options which can speed up the performance of your Sun
SPARC server for some type of applications. The principles haven't really
changed from what you might have done a decade ago, but the availability of
different types of products has changed markedly. Ten years ago users looking
for SPARC processor upgrades could expect to be offered solutions from a variety
of competing chip companies and board makers. Today the SPARC processor upgrade
market has only one manufacturer - sun. But that doesn't mean to say that users
have to get locked into performance upgrades which are uncompetitively priced
compared to other architectures. SPARC Processor Upgrades In an ideal world this should be the simplest and cheapest option. But it ain't any more... Sun has lost its commanding lead in performance. In the mid 1990s Sun promised customers that SPARC chips would always be twice as fast as the fastest Intel chips. Now they struggle to keep up. And Sun has lost most of its SPARC chip competitors too. So as you have already found out - Sun is mostly going to offer you very little incremental CPU speedup for a very large cost. But at least you don't worry about your server getting infected with the MyDoom virus. And your server reset button isn't worn out - as it would be on some other platforms... Sun's poor business performance in recent years has led to a slowdown in the annual improvements offered by new SPARC chips and servers. Many users may find that other types of hardware upgrade which improve the network and other bottlenecks in their systems may provide higher performance at lower cost than simply adding more processors. But if you do decide you need more SPARC horsepower another option is to look at the deals available on new and unused systems from resellers who server this market. Another option, if you're a commercial user and like SPARC technology (but don't like the way that Sun deals with your organization) is to look at replacement systems from the only alternative SPARC mainframe company still in business - Fujitsu. You may have to talk LOUDLY on the phone, because the marketers at Fujitsu's SPARC business seem to be a dozy lot, and may need to be woken up before they recognise a new business opportunity. But their systems have a good reputation. Solid State Disk Accelerators Solid state disks (SSDs) can offer IOPs upto about one thousand times faster than hard disk drives, and there are many well documented case studies in which they have been used to improve business application response times on SPARC servers by a factor of x2 to x 5. It's generally uneconomic to replace the whole of your hard disk storage systems with SSDs, instead the strategy is to use SSDs to implement enough of the physical storage to make an impact on the bottleneck areas. You can use SSDs to replace an individual disk, JBOD, SCSI RAID, NAS or SAN or provide a cache for any of these. Most SSD vendors can advise you on how to tune your system to get the best improvements from your system, and some supply technical services or software to help you achieve this. See also:- Solid state disks. iSCSI and TCP/IP Offload Engines These are host bus adapters which include on board hardware to accelerate iSCSI and TCP/IP network activity. They can be beneficial in creating IP SANs, or for other applications where Gigabit Ethernet activity appears to provide a bottleneck. Even if you have more SPARC processors than your server actually needs for other applications, a dedicated iSCSI card can usually provide faster peroformance. These type of accelerators are particularly useful for shortening the backup window when you're doing offsite data backup or replication. See also:- iSCSI & FCIP Memory Upgrades Unless you already have the maximum amount of memory installed in your servers, then memory upgrades are a simple way to help you get more performance in many applications. The bad news is that because of supply and demand issues that memory capacity is likely to cost you about 50% more this year (2004) than it did last year. Typically you can save 50% of your memory costs by buying memory which is not Sun branded, but which is guaranteed to work in Sun systems. Sun doesn't have any semiconductor facilities and buys its memory from other companies. See also:- RAM Devolving Applications to Dedicated Application Servers If you run more than one major type of application on your server then take a look at offloading applications onto single function dedicated servers with their own disks, memory and other I/O. Some applications like databases do lots of disk I/O on relatively small amounts of data, while others like streaming video or some types of datacoms work on large data blocks. The setups which speed up one type of application - actually make the other type of application run more slowly. Running both types of applications on the same physical hard disk drives makes both run worse. The fashion of devolving applications onto dedicated appliance type servers became popular with web servers in the late 1990s. If you're lucky with your mix of appliations then you should be aiming for a performance speedup of two to five times on your worst performing application, and the cost, will be a lot less than moving to a bigger server. This architectural approach is one which Sun used themselves recently to score points in the benchmarking wars. In that case Sun used Linux AMD appliances as front ends to a SPARC Solaris server. InfiniBand InfiniBand provides users with the capability of clustering servers using 30Gbps rates and low latency instead of the 1 to 4 Gbps Ethernet technologies which are currently available. It's mainly the Japanese server companies which have pioneered the use of InfiniBand bundlded in real-life servers, however we can expect to see laggards like Sun, HP amd IBM also offering support during 2004. In the meantime - you may have to do your own support. See also:- InfiniBand Other Storage Options Depending how much you paid for your SPARC server, you may find that other simple options can also provide a worthwhile speedup. For example upgrading your directly attached storage to Ultra320 SCSI (see SCSI card manufacturers), or changing your local disk drives to faster 15,000 RPM models (see hard drives). The speed of RAID systems, NAS and SAN systems has also increased in recent years while prices have been dropping due to new technology and increased competition among manufacturers. So the go faster storage option which may have been outside your price range just a few years ago, might be worth revisiting now. Conclusions There are lots of ways you can get incremental performance increases ranging from as little as 30% upto more than 300%. Many of the vendors who sell these kinds of products can also advise you on what you need to do. Some of them can provide the whole upgrade as a service. In this article I've concentrated on hardware upgrades. But there are plenty of software application accelerators which can also provide the same kind of speedups. That will have to wait for another article. |
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