As we recently retired our sole T1000, I went into our config room to check the
physical portions of your concerns.
Both the single power supply and single disk are 'showstoppers' for us, since
we prefer as much redundancy as possible for something that's seriously running
as production - which the backup environment definately qualifies. :) For a
non-prod use both these items can be mitigated with UPS/static-power and a
little-known 2xSAS conversion kit.
The lack of CD/DVD drive is more in-line with Sun's marketing of the device -
that of a 'horizontal blade.' If you've handled any of their blade chassis
systems this analogy is very fitting, and should be taken into account when
considering a T1000 system for something like backup.
As far as the FPU is concerned, that is specific to all T1 chip systems,
including the T2000 and their blade. The T2 chip (T5xxx series servers) has
one FPU per core which is better (though not enough for a friend who needed to
run physics engine processes on each thread). From my own observations on a
lowly E450, however, the lack of FPUs is not the #1 concern for a Networker
Server or SN - raw I/O is (which the T2000 at least excels in quite nicely).
The concern regarding encryption is only slightly worrying to me, as I've
already decided that if/when we need to go that route we'll do it in all
hardware and use the T10K drive. Curtis had a recent weblog post on them,
which actually increased my favoring it over LTO-3/4.
I would like to know what the overhead is on Veritas VxVM/VxFS rather than ZFS,
since we'll need to migrate our existing 15 TB of disk from the old Server.
Hopefully I'll have my T2000 available for initial testing soon and will get
back here next month with stats.
As for your initial ZFS testing, was EMC's release or Sun's EBS used? It would
be interesting to find out if Sun's recompile as EBS also enabled proper
CoolThread support. This would also confirm if general CPU speed will affect
Networker on the Sun T1 line.
--TSK
-----=====-----
Timothy Kimball, Sungard/BRASS
yaron wrote:
>
> We just got our new T1000. This is a 6 core (1Ghz) CPU (24 logical
> CPUs in a single socket), 4GE ports, 4GB of RAM and a dual 4Gbps Emulex
> HBA on PCIe. It seems like a very good choice. It does have the
> following issues:
>
> . No CDROM. I spent a couple of days trying to see if I can attach
> anything, just for the installation. It doesn't have USB or external
> SCSI/IDE connector. The only way to install Solaris on this machine is
> inetboot/wanboot. This is not an issue for a Sun shop.
>
> . A single power supply. It would have been nice to have two of them.
>
> . A single floating-point unit for all 24 logical CPUs. I checked
> Networker with Sun's cooltst tool
> (http://cooltools.sunsource.net/cooltst/) on a 280R and it came up as
> 'yellow' (FP: YELLOW (FP Component may be too high (2.56%). Further
> checking required.)) which means that it might be an issue, although I
> didn't notice any problem during the last couple of weeks.
>
> . A single 1Ghz CPU (running nsrmmd) can drive an LTO-2
> (native/compressed) or LTO-3 native with no apparent problem. LTO-3
> compressed and above might be too much for it. Writing to adv_file
> device on a ZFS file system has even worse performance due to file
> system overhead which limits write speed to ~50MBps to a single device
> (this is to a 4TB LUN on a fully populated RAID5 AX150 with 500Gb SATA
> disks).
>
> Regardless of the above I am very satisfied, because I could get
> Sparc hardware at a very low price (web price is ~4800$ for the above
> setup, but with 1 year NBD hardware warranty) and with great
> performance. If you have more money to spend, you can spend 9000$ for
> the minimal T2000 (4 core < at > 1Ghz, 8Gb RAM, SAS disks, a second PS, a
> DVD
> and a empty PCIe/PCI-X slots). The newer T5xxx are also attractive, but
> I didn't even bother to get a price quote for them.
>
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