Yay for the V40z

Writing about web page http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v40z/

This is my favourite bit of hardware at the moment. You can keep your iPod, and your Wii; when it comes to promoting a relaxed and cheerful demeanor these things are the biz. (closely followed by our Netapp , but that’s another blog entry).

Reasons that a v40 rocks:

1) Fast. You have to really work hard to max out one of these things doing web stuff. 4 dual-core 2.6Ghz Opterons, 32G of RAM, and 64-bit Solaris 10 makes (for me at least) the perfect platform for a high-load Java web app,

We have two in day-to-day production at the moment. One serves about 60GB/day of dynamic web pages and it’s CPU sits around 10% – 15% all day long. To be honest, a box with half as many CPUs would do the job just fine – but it’s nice to know that should we get a sudden increase in load on the app, we have more than enough headroom!
The other runs a bunch of Solaris 10 zones (6 at last count, still growing), isolating 6 separate end-user apps, with about 10 JBoss instances, an oracle server, squid caches, ruby httpds, apache httpds, a Lucene indexer, and a bunch of haproxy load-balancers. It’s using about 12 of it’s 32GB of RAM, but it’s CPU rarely goes above 20% (in fact, it rarely goes above 5% except when the search indexer is running).

2) Reliable. We’ve had the odd disk go, and I expect we’ll loose other bits and pieces before the machines go out of warranty, but they really are remarkably trouble-free. Especially the zone container – from previous experience, 6 stand-alone boxes would have experienced at least one critical failure by now. The box is quite capable of losing NICs, PSUs, Fans, Disks, Memory, and even CPUs, and carrying on going (admittedly it’ll need a reboot if a CPU or a DIMM goes, but that’s about it). It doesn’t have the duplicate backplanes that one or two of our bigger boxes have, but then again you can buy an entire, fully-loaded V40z for less than the cost of the redundant backplane in a v880!

3) Low-power. Despite sounding like a 747 when the fans spin up, once they get going these are surprisingly parsimonious with the watts. The CPUs will power-step down from a max. of ~750W to a minium of about 350W when the load is low (as it usually is), so the consumption of our zone container is an order of magnitude less than the equivalent of ‘real’ boxes would have been.

4) Small footprint. Despite being mighty fast, they fit nicely into a 3U enclosure, and they run cool enough that you can have a whole rack-full of them if you want.

They have loads of other cool features that we aren’t really using much at the moment – iLOM for lights-out management, infiniband support if you want to cluster them, and more expansion slots than you can shake a stick at . They are lovely, lovely boxes, and everyone who runs a big web app should get one (actually, they’re pretty cheap, so get two, in case the first one ever needs a reboot).

I wait with interest to see whether the Sun+Intel hookup, or the new ‘Rock’ Sparc chips, can produce a box as great as this one…

Chris May : 30 Jan 2007 10:40 |  Tags: Solaris |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem