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[Networker] ANALYSIS: Networker server price/performance
2005-12-06 20:47:06
OK, after our first week with the new storage node, I thought I'd share
some simple estimations of price/performance when it comes to the AMD
Opteron, running Linux vs. the Sparc platform, running solaris.
As you may be aware of, I have posted quite a few posts about NIC and
server performance regarding the Sun V440 server, and the Cassini NIC. My
conclusion was then that a V440 can push about 1gb/s of data from the
network to the drives, before all four CPUs get maxed out.
Our new 2CPU AMD opteron server can push 1gb data over the network with
approx 50-60% CPU idle time, including I/O wait, system CPU, interrupts
etc. I'm talking about actual production backup traffic flowing through
networker here, not some silly benchmark test.
The cost of a 4CPU V440 server is approx $25000. The cost of a HP DL385
server with two opteron CPUs is about $6500. So, since the opteron can
push twice as much data, the math looks like this: (25000*2)/6500=~7,69 .
So, my conclusion is that you get about 8x performance for every invested
dollar/euro/krona etc if you buy AMD based servers instead of sparc based
ones. That's a significant price/performance ratio difference, worthy of
most upper management people's attention.
Ofcpurse, the Linux kernel/drivers could also have been a contributing
factor, and that the OSes are not directly comparable. But I still see an
obvious fact.. No wonder Sun is trying to market their AMD servers so
hard! :)
And why am I writing this? Partly because I wanted to follow up on my
previous postnings, and partly because I think its in most sysadminst
inetests to know what actual non-biased relevant performance figures may
look like in the real world for the application they're probably running.
//Oscar
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