Sun Microsystems' CMT Servers Set New World Records on Enterprise Applications

SANTA CLARA, CA, August 19, 2009 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced that its Sun SPARC Enterprise servers with chip multi-threading (CMT) technology set three new world-records on industry-standard e-mail serving and Java benchmarks. These records highlight the enterprise-class performance and significant infrastructure and management cost savings Sun's Open Network Systems with the Solaris Operating System (OS) deliver through the convergence of compute, networking and storage. Sun also announced outstanding performance on the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (BI Suite EE) test and Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM).

Highlights:
- Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 Server is 2.6x Faster than IBM POWER6 System on Enterprise Java Workloads
- Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 Server Supports 2x More Corporate Email Users Than Competitive Intel Xeon- Based System

The results announced today are:

SPECjbb2005 - On this industry-standard benchmark that emulates the design of real-world server-side Java applications, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 server running OpenSolaris 2009.06 source code and the latest version of Sun's Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) software (version 1.6.0_14 Performance Release), posted a single-chip world record. The SPARC Enterprise T5220 server with a 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC T2 processor delivered 2.6x better performance than the IBM p570 with one 4.7 GHz POWER6 processor and consumed only 520 watts on average(1). Additionally, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server with four 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors delivered the best single JVM result for all systems with 32 cores or fewer(2).

SPECmail2009 - The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server, powered by two eight-core 1.6GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, outperformed all other messaging server solutions and set a new world record on SPECmail2009 with 12,000 SPECmail_Ent2009 IMAP4 users at 57,758 sessions/hour. The SPARC Enterprise T5240 server running the Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.3 on top of the Solaris OS doubled the sessions/hour rate and supported 2x more users than the result posted by the Apple Xserve. Sun's solution with Sun StorageTek 2540 arrays also used 10 percent fewer disks than the Intel Xeon-based Apple solution(3). Designed to simulate real-world corporate e-mail environments, this benchmark result highlights the SPARC Enterprise T5240 server's ability to serve e-mail in a large enterprise environment using industry-standard protocols.

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition -- The SPARC Enterprise T5440 server with 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, Solaris Containers and Oracle Database 11g software, delivered outstanding performance with 28,000 concurrent users on the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition test. The test of 280,000 named users with 10 percent concurrency simulates an organization that needs to support a large number of concurrent users, each performing a mixed set of tasks such as ad-hoc reporting, application development and report viewing. The business processes in the test closely represent a real-world scenario with a fully populated underlying database schema. This result demonstrates the SPARC Enterprise T5440 server's ability to handle large enterprise BI deployments and the scalability of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition cluster with four nodes running in Solaris Containers on a single server system(4).

Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) -- The SPARC Enterprise T5240 server equipped with two UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors running at 1.6 GHz delivered a world record ZXTM HTTP throughput result of 13.4 Gbit/sec with price/performance of $5,500/Gbps. The Sun server delivered 34 percent better performance and 2.6x better price/performance than a F5 BIG-IP VIPRION appliance configured with a single blade. This benchmark result demonstrates that Sun's general-purpose CMT servers can surpass the performance of special-purpose hardware appliances at a lower price point.

SPEC and the benchmark names SPECmail and SPECjbb are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from this announcement and spec.org, as of 08/12/09.

(1) Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 (1 chip, 8 cores) 231,464 SPECjbb2005 bops, 28,933 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM . IBM Power 570 (1 chips, 2 cores) 88,089 SPECjbb2005 bops, 88,089 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM
(2) Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 (4 chips, 32 cores) 688,692 SPECjbb2005 bops, 688,692 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM.
(3) Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 (16 cores, 2 chips) SPECmail_Ent2009 12,000 users at 57,758 SPECmail2009 Sessions/hour. Apple Xserve (8 cores, 2 chips) SPECmail_Ent2009 6,000 users at 28,887 SPECmail2009 sessions/hour.
(4) Results as of 8/18/09. For more information on Oracle BI EE benchmark, see oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/docs/oraclebiee_28000user_benchmark_on_solaris_t5440.pdf

Source: Sun Microsystems, Inc.