I wrote a few weeks ago about the end of the mini generation. This time I thought I would dig out some data to support my case. My personal anecdotal evidence is what I am hearing from my customers. They are looking at replacing hundreds of legacy Unix servers with new high performance Xeon boxes. I am not talking about a one-for-one replacement, but using virtualization to replace 5 to 25 of these older unix boxes with each Xeon 5500 server. The economic incentives here are pretty staggering.
Why now?
I see multiple reasons
1) Ecosystem maturity. Enterprise class tools for virtualization, Linux, high availability from VMware, KVM, Xen, RedHat, Suse and others
2) Performance. The performance of 200-2005 vintage sparc and ultra-sparc boxes is easily replaced by Xeon – saving power, space, and potentially licensing.
3) Applications readiness. Applications like Oracle are now “made for linux” and do great on X-86 platforms
4) Staff. You have the expertise in Linux on Xeon, this is a growing area, capitalize on it.
5) Economics. There is real savings to be had in licensing, power, space, staff, sanity( sanity savings is subjective).
I hopped out to tpc.org to look at some benchmarks. Benchmarks are notoriously awful as measures of actual performance, but they do work – mostly – as a comparison of relative performance.
There isn’t a lot of Sparc data, and much of it is old, but if you are looking at replacing some aging 4+ year old Unix hardware, that may be just what you need. (with respects to Bryce’s cash for clunkers blog).
For TPC-C the most recent Sparc result I found was from 2003. Running Oracle Database 10g EE on Sun Solaris 8 on 64 single cores of Fujitsu SPARC64 - 1.3 GHz processors, they delivered 595702 tpmC at $12.43/tpmC (tpc.org)
So if “this old machine" is setting in your landscape, gulping power and support costs, you could replace it today by running Oracle Database 11g SE1 on Oracle Linux 2 quad core Intel Xeon Processors X5570 2.93GHz delivering 631766 tpmC at $1.08/tpmC (tpc.org)
The ROI on this must be about 10 minutes! Ok maybe that is a bit quick, but this is a data base! Export, Import, ta-da! What are you going to do with all that extra rack space and power?
Replace a 64 socket platform with a 2 socket platform. Amazing. this could be 1U, or even a blade. You could put it under your desk. There have got to be some examples of older sparc and power boxes sitting in the landscape. Let me know what you have.
-Ken