Yet Another Siebel 8.0 PSPP Benchmark on Sun CMT Hardware .. ~ Creation Zone

.. Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240.

(This blog entry also serves as a summary page for all the Siebel 8.0 benchmarks that Sun published so far.)

On November 14, 2008 Sun published a brand new 10,000 user Siebel 8.0 benchmark result using a combination of T5240 and T5120 servers. In this benchmark, a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server equipped with two 1.2 GHz, 8-Core UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors served as the system under test on which we ran the Siebel Gateway and Enterprise application servers. Two Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 servers equipped with one 1.2 GHz, 8-Core UltraSPARC T2 processor were configured to run the Oracle database and the Sun Java System Web servers.

A copy of the latest benchmark publication is available on Oracle Applications' benchmark web site at:
Siebel CRM Release 8.0 Industry Applications and Oracle 10g R2 DB on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 & T5240 servers running Solaris 10

For some reason, the topology diagram in the benchmark publication document was messed up esp. the fonts -- probably the odt -> doc -> pdf conversion. The clean copy of the diagram is shown below.

Significance of the Siebel 8.0 on T5240 benchmark

In case if anyone wonder why do we need another Siebel 8.0 benchmark on CMT hardware esp. when we already published couple of Siebel 8.0 benchmarks on T5220 and T5440 systems -- 10,000 users on T5120/T5220 and 14,000 users on T5440, the answer is simple: to show linear scalability.

In the first benchmark that Sun published in January 2008, we showed the scalability of the application, Siebel, on T5220 systems. We were able to scale up to 5,000 concurrent users on a single T5220 system (running the Siebel application servers) with 1.2 GHz, 8-Core US-T2 processor. We've used two such systems to publish the 10,000 user benchmark in the first installment.

The goal of the second benchmark that we published in October 2008 during the T5440 server launch showcases how to consolidate multiple workloads on a T5440 server. We demonstrated it by deploying the whole Siebel Enterprise -- Sun Java System Web Server along with the Siebel Web Server plug-in Siebel Web Engine (SWE), Siebel Gateway Server, Siebel Application Server and the Oracle Database Server -- on a single Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server equipped with four 1.4 GHz, 8-Core UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors. We ran 14,000 concurrent virtual users against this setup to make it a benchmark publication. Since we ran all tiers of Siebel Enterprise on the same box, it is hard to compare the scalability numbers from this benchmark against the numbers that we published in the 10,000 user benchmark on T5120/T5220 servers.

In April 2008, Sun has launched the first multi-processor CMT system, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240. T5240 holds two UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, and is supposed to exhibit 2x performance[1] as that of a T5220. In other words, two T5220 servers can be consolidated onto a single T5240. To prove this, we re-ran the 10,000 user benchmark that we published back in January 2008 by replacing the two T5220 servers in the application tier with a T5240 server, and keeping the remaining hardware configuration for the web and database servers intact. The results from this benchmark speak for themselves - but for your convenience here is the quick summary of the results.

#users	#units x Server Model	Business Transactions Throughput/hour	Projected Daily Transactions	Benchmark Publication URL & Date
10,000	2 x T5220	142,061	1,136,488	10K/T5220, 01/2008
10,000	1 x T5240	141,205	1,129,640	10K/T5240, 11/2008