You have to consider the capabilities of the SPARC T3-1 server if you're comparing it to an x86 box. First off you're getting a CMT CPU with 16 cores with 8 threads each, giving you 128 hardware threads to work with, per SPARC T3 CPU. Each of those cores also has a floating point engine and a crypto engine. On top of that, you get two PCI-E gen 2 controllers and dual 10GbE controllers, all on the processor. The icing on the cake is the UltraSPARC hypervisor which enables LDoms (now Oracle VM Server for SPARC). You can do massive amounts of consolidation with these servers. I'll put this into perspective, with a T5220, you can easily replace a few V880s, this is more than double that CPU, memory, and I/O capacity, at a fraction of the cost of what a v880 cost when it was new.
While x86 gear is cheaper on the surface, as soon as you add the extra memory, crypto cards, hypervisor software (VMware), etc. you'll spend a whole lot more than you would on this box. So really, is it that bad of a deal? I think not! Not to mention that if you're going to virtualize, you can consolidate more Solaris instances as Containers or LDoms than you could with VMware on an x86 server, plus with considerably less overhead and cost. And even if you're not going to virtualize, and say run a lot of java app servers, you can save a lot with these types of servers. I've helped customers consolidate java app servers on x86 and Linux to T-series servers running on Solaris with considerable savings. In one case, went from over 100 x86 servers down to a few dozen T5220s. When you consider the TCO, it was hands down cheaper. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Rthoreau <r7h0...@att.net> To: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org Sent: Thu, October 28, 2010 3:38:25 AM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] prices for new Sparc T3 series and their sold on oracle store Edward Martinez <mindbende...@live.com> writes: > whom ever needs one they are already available through oracle store starting > at >$18,639 :-) > maybe somebody can give me one for my birthday;-) > >https://shop.sun.com/store/product/e823f71d-d883-11de-9869-080020a9ed93?intcmp=soc >c >https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:2:0::NO:RP,2:PROD_HIER_ID:7246562218191186367847 >7 It would be nice to see some benchmarks just looking at the specs it seems you are paying a lot for software and little for hardware. Especially when you think about the warranty as only one year and hearing horror stories about older hardware support from some customers. You would get more warranty from building your own and probably save you some cash if you did not need the sparc cpu's and extra thread support. But maybe I digress as I haven't considered the Oracle software cost and probably would be happy running something on the floss lines like Postgresql or even dare I say it Mysql. Seriously those specs are pretty low for that price range if you just consider the hardware side of the equation. The basic hard-drive is 300 GB sas drive and only comes with 16 GB of memory and you want me to drop almost 20K on one. Man I feel violated just on moral principle. Rthoreau _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
