Sun Fire T2000 Test Drive - Initial Receipt and Setup

Intro

This post is the first in a series documenting our performance testing of the Sun Fire T2000 server against the servers we currently use for the FeedLounge production site.

Sign Up Process

3 easy steps to a server:

1. Signed up for the 60 day free trial. Qualification is easy: (a) you have multi-threaded apps, and (b) they will run on Solaris 10. This one is easy for anyone standing on the shoulders of the open source giants.
2. Received a call about being a business - This one seems to be incorrect, but I am just telling you my experience. According to Jonathan:
   

   And to answer a few of the comment questions - the offer applies to anyone interested - not just corporate customers. We don’t care if you’re an educator or a park ranger or a blogger or a physicist or a CIO - so long as you’re in the market for the fastest/most efficient server on earth.

   This is directly in conflict with the fact that the registration page still notes that company is a required field, and that I was required by the salesperson to have a Federal EIN.

3. Received server 4 days later - This was much faster than most people have blogged about, but it may be because I chose the configuration that most closely matched our existing servers, instead of trying for the maxxed out configuration.

Before I received the server, I received the quote for the server:

• 6 Core 1.0 GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor with 6 cores (24 threads)
• 8 GB DDR2 memory
• 2*73GB Hard Drives
• Redundant power supplies
• 4 GBE ports
• Quote total: $10,895.00 US

The server showed up at the office as 2 boxes : the largest is the server (including rack mounting hardware, 2 network cables, warranty, and a sheet of URLs pointing you to the documentation). The other, seemingly oversized box was just 2 power cords, presumably to keep international shipments easier to process.

The server itself is beautiful, almost like Sun hired Apple to design and build it. Maybe there is a marriage there someday. I would also note that Sun’s experience in the server market shows in every piece of the design. Everything is easily removable, marked well, and generally pleasing to any eyeball.

Setup Disappoinment

I unboxed everything, tried to find a quiet corner, and started the setup. Since they publish all documentation for the server in one place, it is easy to get started.

• Setup server on table, with a piece of cardboard underneath to not damage the server or the table).
• Plug in network cable and power cable. Wait a second! As soon as you plug in the first power cable, it comes to life, and I must say it is quite rowdy (where rowdy is loud). Pull the plug until we are ready.
• Get down to about here in the docs, and it says:
  

  1. If you have not already done so, connect a terminal or a terminal emulator (PC or workstation) to the SC serial management port. Configure the terminal or terminal emulator with these settings:

  * 9600 baud

  * 8 bits

  * No parity

  * 1 Stop bit

  * No handshaking

  Note - When you power on the server for the first time and you do not have a terminal or terminal emulator (PC or workstation) connected to the SC serial management port, you will not see system messages. The display disappears after about 60 seconds.

  2. Turn on the terminal or terminal emulator, if it is not already turned on.

  3. Connect the AC power cables to Power Supply 0 and Power Supply 1, and watch the terminal for system messages.

  Great, where is the magic serial cable? It didn’t come in the box. How do you expect me to set up this server? Where is my great OOB experience!?!

  Not to worry, I ran out to Radio Shack (Fry’s is way too far away these days), and picked up the parts and soldering iron to build myself a serial cable. Good times, I hadn’t soldered for about 10 years, and it is only partially like riding a bicycle, so my joints look like crap, but do work. I bought the Radio Shack 276-1538 DB9 Female Serial connector, a $7.99 soldering kit (wow), and hacked up an old cat5 cable.

  Just take a normal cat 5 network cable, hack off one end, and solder up pin 2 to white/green, pin 3 to green, and pin 5 to both blue and blue/white. Works like a charm. For those using windows, it is trivial to use HyperTerminal to see all the output of the management processor. That is, after you surrender and tell it which area code to use.

  Update: Sue Tobin of Sun called me to follow up after a couple of weeks (excellent), informed me that the serial cable is now included in the box and apologized for any inconvenience. I told her that was excellent news, as it was the single largest barrier to my testing of the server.

  Once I had a serial cable, following the manual to set up the server and get it on the network took just a shade under 1 hour.

System management processor is always on, giving you great remote control…

Assistance From Sun

A Denver area Sun employee has graciously offered to give his time gratis to us to bring up the FeedLounge services on the server (configuring SMF, etc).

As mentioned previously, I also received a follow up call by Sue to check in on me and make sure everything was going well. She responded well to my anger constructive criticism.

Running

The server is now up and running, and boy is it loud! Not really coffee table material. Over the next couple of weeks, we will set up the full FeedLounge architecture on the machine, and benchmark it to a similar setup of our current Opteron based system.

Our current machine is:

• Dual Opteron (Single Core)
• 8GB RAM
• 6x 250GB SATA drives
• Redundant Power Supplies
• 2x Gigabit Ethernet
• Cost: $4900

As you can see, the hard drives don’t match up, so I will keep my testing as drive agnostic as possible.

Why are we doing it?

As with almost any hosted service, FeedLounge pays for hosting in 3 ways (most to least important): By the megabit, by the watt, and by floor space. Since power is an extremely significant part of the equation, anything that drives that number down will significantly drop the overall hosting cost. We are already working on driving down the megabit cost by using gzip, and being smart about bandwidth.

The second reason is that FeedLounge caters extremely well to the massive multi-threading this server is capable of. We use heavy database, web serving, and feed parsing. Almost all of that code is threaded heavily (and where it isn’t, it is large numbers of single threaded processes), and is also lacking in the floating point. If we can get better performance out of less electricity, it is a double win for FeedLounge. Throw in the onboard crypto accelerator, and we are talking about a pretty compelling offering.

Props to Sun

I have to give Sun credit for trying to do something progressive and decidedly “non-corporate” (and also admitting to and fixing any warts in an open manner). The biggest issue, lack of the serial adapter cable, is a big win for the evaluation experience.

Now if only Sun was giving free trials on large amounts of storage. Maybe we should just look at using Amazon S3.

Next up: fitting a round peg into a square hole. Or rather, a Linux sysadmin learns the Solaris ropes.