Siebel 8.0 on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 - More Bang for the Buck!!

Recently Sun announced the 14,000 user Siebel 8.0 PSPP benchmark results on a single Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440. An Oracle white paper with Sun's 14,000 user benchmark results is available on Oracle's Siebel benchmark web site. The content in this blog post complements the benchmark white paper.

Some of the notes and highlights from this competitive benchmark are as follows:

• Key specifications for the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 system under test, are: 4 x UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, 32 cores, 256 compute threads and 128 GB of memory in a 4RU space.
  
  
• The entire Siebel 8.0 solution was deployed on a single Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 including the web, gateway, application, and database servers.
  
  
  9 load driver clients with dual-core Opteron and Xeon processors were used to load up 14,000 concurrent users
  
  
• Web, Application and the Database servers were isolated from each other by creating three Solaris Containers (non-global zones or local zones) dedicated one each for all those servers.
  
  
  Solaris 10 Binary Application Guarantee Program guarantees the binary compatibility for all applications running under Solaris native host operating system environments as well as Solaris 10 OS running as a guest operating system in a virtualized platform environment.
  
  
• Siebel Gateway server and the Siebel Application servers were installed and configured in one of the three Solaris Containers. Two identical copies of Siebel Application server instances were configured to handle 7,000 user load by each of those instances.
  
  
  From our experiments with the Siebel 8.0 benchmark workload, it appears that a single instance of Siebel Application server could scale up to 10,000 active users. Siebel Connection Broker (SCBroker) component becomes the bottleneck at the peak load in a single instance of the Siebel Application server.
  
  
• To keep it simple, the benchmark publication white paper limits itself to an overview of the system configuration. The full details are available in the diagram below.
  
  Topology Diagram
  
  
  
  The breakdown of the approximate averages of CPU and memory utilization by each tier is shown below.
  
  

  Tier	CPU	Memory
  Web	78%	4.50 GB
  App	76%	69.00 GB
  DB	72%	20.00 GB

  
  
  System-wide averages are as follows:
  
  

  Tier	CPU	Memory
  Web + App + DB	82%	93.5 GB

  
  
  
• 1276 watts is the average power consumption when all the 14,000 concurrent users are in the steady state of the benchmark test. That is, in the case of similarly configured workloads, T5440 supports 10.97 users per watt of the power consumed; and supports 3500 users per rack unit.

Based on the above notes: Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 is inexpensive, requires: less power and data center footprint, ideal for consolidation and equally importantly scales well.

Vendor-to-Vendor comparison

How does Sun's new 14,000 user benchmark result compare with the high watermark benchmark results published by other vendors using the same Siebel 8.0 PSPP workload?

Besides Sun, IBM and HP are the only other vendors who published benchmark results so far with the Siebel 8.0 PSPP benchmark workload. IBM's highest user count is 7,000; where as 5,200 is HP's. Here is a quick comparison of the throughputs based on the results published by Sun, IBM and HP with the highest number of active users.

Sun Microsystems' 14,000 user benchmark on a single T5440 outperformed:

• IBM's 7,000 user benchmark result by 1.9x
  
  IBM published the 7,000 user result with 3 x p570 systems running AIX.
  
  
• HP's 5,200 user benchmark result by 2.5x
  
  HP published the 5,200 user result with a combination of 2 x BL460c running Windows Server 2003 and 1 x rx6600 HP system running HP-UX.
  
  
• Sun's own 10,000 user benchmark result on a combination of 2 x T5120 and 2 x T5220s by 1.4x

From the operating system perspective, Solaris outperformed AIX, Windows Server 2003 and HP-UX. Linux is nowhere to be found in the competitive landscape.

A simple comparison of all the published Siebel 8.0 benchmark results (as of today) by all vendors justifies the title of this blog post. As IBM and HP do not post the list price of all of their servers, I am not even attempting to show the price/performance comparison in here. On the other hand, Sun openly lists out all the list prices at store.sun.com web site.

CAUTION

Although T5440 possesses a ton of great qualities, it might not be suitable for deploying workloads with heavy single-threaded dependencies. The T5440 is an excellent hardware platform for multi-threaded, and moderately single-threaded/multi-process workloads. When in doubt, it is a good idea to leverage Sun Microsystems' Try & Buy program to try the workloads on this new and shiny T5440 before making the final call.

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I would like to share the tuning information from the OS and the underlying hardware perspective for couple of reasons -- 1. Oracle's benchmark white paper does not include any of the system specific tuning information, and 2. it may take quite a bit of time for Oracle Corporation to update the Siebel Tuning Guide for Solaris with some of the tuning information that you find in here.

Check the second part of this blog post for the best practices running Siebel on Sun CMT hardware.

(Originally posted at:
http://blogs.sun.com/mandalika/entry/siebel_8_0_on_sun)
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