Comments on: Sun begins Sparc phase of server overhaul

Launch of new "Niagara" is key to effort to restore its ailing server fortunes by catering to its core customers.
Photos: Niagara servers unleashed

[SqlserverCode]

Too bad for Sun

We just switched some of our Sun machines for IBM machines. The Sun machines are just not what they used to be, motherboards are failing, memory gets out of whack etc etc I am not taking about peanuts either, this is a 1.2 million dollar contract

http://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/

[zkysr]

What are you talking about exactly?

Sun's server quality has been getting better over the years. You have not touched the T2000. The T2000 is for web serving not SQL. You don't even reference which Sun systems gave you problems. All server vendors have certain systems that people complain about. What does your post have to do with this particular system? Do you feel threatened by this system in some way?

[DavidHalko]

recent memory failures unlikely

I find memory failures increasing rather unlikely.

The memory chip in high end SUN servers have been the same technology for MANY years.

I guess bricks start to catch on fire on the 5th story of buildings because they are not what they used to be on the first story of buildings

[cndkc]

Not quite there yet?

The T1 sounds like a great step forward to me, however (as often happens) the software world will need to catch up and provide better tools for creating parallel processing multi-threaded software before it becomes a real success - maybe they should give the tools away to encourage us :-)
On the plus side Sun also have the single-threaded apps covered with their Opteron boxes, so I suppose you can buy both and take your pick as necessary :-)

[andrew243]

Arrived

Actually there are a very large number of apps which can exploit thread level concurrency now and which will therefore run well on the T1000 and T2000.

Most Web, AppServer workloads using say Apache and a J2EE app server should perform very well and Sun's initial SPECweb/SPECjbb/SPECJapp results show this and these workloads are very common.

In addition the T2000 (T1000 does not have enough I/O) should be good for DBMS's particularly OLTP, fileserving, mail/messaging servers, fp servers, and workloads like search engines. Sun have published a very good Notes benchmark result and a SAP SD result for the T2000.

At the same time major commercial customers are struggling with Datacenter power and heat budgets and concern is rising about the unit cost of powering ever more power hungry servers.

So far from the T2000 not being quite there yet I would say it has arrived at exactly the right time.