Different CPU, same challenges

A cluster of the gear supports 1.2 TB of SSD.

think your discussion with Mika and all your other comments deserve a longer comment. Obviously Sun doesn't think that all the people are retards out there. I'm a presales engineer in my daytime job. This blog is just my job in the evening or in low load moments. The problem with your comments is that you think that Sun just consists out of greedy retards. And with this you imply that many of the customers of Suns are just dumb retards buying overpriced stuff. One problem with intelligent people in a certain age is that they believe to understand the world and think off all others just as morons. But those morons have several reasons to be morons.

Obviously you can get to your favorite hardware dealer and buy some disks and save some money. I found it really strange, when we discussed about HP/Dell prices after the proof that they have almost the same price than the Sun one, that you use newegg ones in HP/DELL. OF course you can do this in a Sun Server as well. And you get the same answer from Sun Support as from Dell Support or HP Support: "Sorry we cant help you"

But: Are they really the same. I wrote a while ago something about this 600$ hard disks. There are several reasons why harddisks are that expensive when you purchase them from a tier-1 vendor, and that isn't the case because of a bunch of greedy vendors. In an environment competitive like the server market greed is punished. And please compare the price of Dell/HP servers with free-market disks with the price of vendor delivered disks in a Sun system. For example: How do you know that the firmware of your disks is reasonably bug-free? Perhaps you know it by experience or you are willingly to take the risks. But other people think different. They and to choke a throat in case of a bug. Because Sun/Dell/HP don't want to be choked, they check and test the disks in qualification testing and after those testing it get the label "It's okay for enterprise use. Feel free to choke our throat, when you find a bug that has gone through all the tests".

Many people feel, that hard disks and memory and things like that are commodity componets. But they aren't. We just believe it, because we get poor to medium quality components very cheap at the next el-cheapo shack. But quality hardware with vendor support, assured capability to deliver and so on isn't cheap.

It's pretty much the same with car insurances. In Germany car insurances are relatively cheap. When you drive some years without accident even a high powered model is dirt-cheap. One of the reasons is the dense network of technical checks. Every two years the german driver is in fear of his car and all the bills in regard of getting the car through the checks. So we have only a relatively low number of accidents due to technical defects. The car insurance prices drops. Other countries have different systems. High prices for insurances, but you are able to get a car through the checks that would shock the living daylights out of every german TUEV engineer.

The first one tries to prevent the damages. The second one pays for the damages. Now take this two different mindsets and put it into the IT.A good example is your comment thread with Mika. Given the email addresses of you both it's a not too far fetched assumption that you both have two separate mind sets.

As i wrote before in citation of Marten Mikos: There are customers with money, but no time and there are customers with time, but no money. Of course you can create a cheaper version of a S7000 with commodity parts. But others like to buy a package: With all the knowledge, with all the risk mitigation, with all the stuff you need in an enterprise environment. They don't give a sh...t which proc runs in this system, they just want a running package.

There is a problem with the marketing of the S7000. It consists out of components that looks exactly like our servers and the people think: Where is the difference? Why do i pay more for the S7000 than the sum of components. The reason is simple. It's a system, not a bunch of components. It's tested in it's entirety. It's developed to be an appliance with no access to the OS.

I have more than one customer that said: I don't want you hardware, but i want your software. Because the people recognized that the S7000 isn't a cheap offer compared with the DIY approach, but they recognized as well that it takes a long time to replicate all the developments in the S7000. But it doesn't work that way. It's a system. And to be honest: The price is calculated in that way to sell both in conjunction. Many people are used to get their software for cheap, but someone has to develop the Shadow Migration, someone has to develop the User Interface, someone has to develop all the small and big additions to the pure Solaris that are embedded into the firmware of the System. And those developments have to be funded. How do you fund such developments? By selling products. It's that simple. Of course: When you just need OpenSolaris and ZFS, just use it, use your favorite vendor of hardware and use OpenSolaris or Solaris 10. Perhaps you even buy an support contract. Given the fact that you use L2ARC, i assume you use OpenSolaris 2009.06. Or do you have need no support contract? And then you have to pay people like Brendan getting the most out of the system. BTW: Brendan wrote in his benchmarks that his tests were done to max out the CPUs to show case the maximum performance of the gear. He made that very clear. Of course your performance will be smaller. But interestingly we many many customers whose hot-data fits in the memory and the warm data fitting into the SSD. Of course there are alway workloads larger or with a pattern killing the SSD advantages. But for 80% it's a reasonable fit.

Maybe you are right about the performance advantage of Nehalem, albeit i consider Opteron as a very balanced plattform perfectly for a task like file serving. Additionally: What you see at the moment is the classic game of leap frogging. At one moment a certain CPU is faster than the other, but this changes. The problem: When you have a product in the market you can't jump to get some additional platform. You have to test all the stuff again, you have to tune the stuff again. You don't jump from one system to another. That would make the product more expensive as you have to support several different systems.

It's perfectly possible that Sun Engineering will switch over to Nehalem as soon all requirements are fulfilled by this proc (eg quad-sockets), the performance characteristics are fully understood.

BTW: Interesting that you are citing Anandtech. Just have a look at the recent article there and it's conclusion at http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3653&p=10: "So who wins? Intel's dual socket, AMD's dual socket, or AMD's quad socket platform? The answer is that it depends on your performance/RAM ratio. The more performance you require per GB, the more interesting the dual Nehalem platform gets. The more RAM you need to obtain a certain level of performance, the more interesting the AMD quad platform gets. " As you may have noticed those S7000 systems are usually maxed out on the memory side.

By the way ... on one side you tout that the Nehalem EX is the faster and better proc, but on the other side you wrote that the CPU is unimportant.

I want to come to a conclusion at the end to end this topic from my side as i want to proceed with writing new articles: You should take into consideration, that other customers have other views on the same problem and come to other conclusion. The fact that the S7000 is a well-selling product it the fact, that our conclusions about the market can't be that wrong. Enough said from my side.

Sorry, but that the CPU is sitting idling isn't true.

1. While some Cores may sitting idling at a point in time the rest of the CPU is put under heavy load, like the I/O-Subsystem, the interconnects between the CPUs and so on.

2. You have to remember, that a S7000 isn't your fathers storage system. You want cores in you storage system, you want many of them: You want them to do iSCSI, you want them to do NFS, you want them to do CIFS, you want them to do Infiniband. You want them to do checksum calculations, you want them to do encryption, you want them to do deduplication, you want them to do a lot of tasks. And you want them to do this all at the same moment.