Sun announced that the Solaris platform, including the Solaris 10 OS and OpenSolaris, has been extended to provide performance, energy efficiency and reliability enhancements for the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.
“This is a real-world game-changer in the commodity x86 marketplace. Sun’s new Solaris advancements unleash the power of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, delivering enterprise-class engineering and innovation in this market,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. “Sun’s systems and Solaris optimization provide record-breaking performance, scalability and huge energy efficiency to help customers maximize their business results.”
Solaris is designed to take advantage of large memory and multi-core/processor/thread systems and enables industry leading performance and scalability on Intel Xeon processors. Solaris ZFS provides unparalleled data integrity, capability, performance and management and DTrace dynamic tracing framework allows close observation of system behavior, without degrading performance. In addition, Solaris Containers allow integrated virtualization with low overhead. Solaris-based systems using the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series automatically leverage new Intel Quick Path Interconnect, Intel Turbo Boost and Intel Hyper-Threading technologies to further improve performance and scalability.
Sun and Intel have enhanced Solaris power management capabilities to leverage the advanced power states of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, boosting energy efficiency by adjusting processor power on-demand in response to system utilization. The Power Aware Dispatcher automatically monitors and optimizes a company’s system to maximize performance while minimizing power consumption. For example, it utilizes Intel’s new Deep C-States to dramatically reduce power consumed by idle cores.
Intel has worked with Sun to implement PowerTop functionality for Solaris. Intel PowerTOP utilizes Solaris DTrace to let developers and administrators observe where applications may be preventing part of a system from going into a power-saving state and to monitor in real time how effectively a system is taking advantage of new processor power-management features like Intel Turbo Boost.
To improve reliability, the Solaris platform also provides predictive self-healing capabilities for systems based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. The Solaris Fault Management Architecture (FMA), which detects and automatically avoids repeated hardware faults in system components, has been extended to utilize status information from the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.
With these updates and optimizations, Sun and Intel have achieved the following new world record benchmarks for Solaris on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. Sun’s newest dual processor server based on Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, the Sun Fire X4270 (2 processors/ 8 cores/16 threads), running SAP ERP application Release 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) with Oracle Database on top of Solaris 10 OS delivered the highest two-processor Unicode result on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark, as of March 30, 2009. Sun has been working with Unicode versions of SAP software for the past two years and has gained significant expertise in that area. This leading benchmark result highlights the optimal performance of SAP ERP software on Intel Xeon-based systems from Sun as well as seamless multilingual support available for SAP ERP applications.