02 November 2015

JomaSoft's Performance Results on #SPARC T7 Server

SPARC M7
Oracle announced the 32 Cores 4.13Ghz #SPARC M7 Processor with Software in Silicon features and T7 and M7 Servers at Oracle OpenWorld.

You can find details in Masood Heydari's Presentation at Oracle OpenWorld


Summary
We @JomaSoft recently completed performance tests on Oracle’s SPARC T7 system running Virtual Datacenter Control Framework (#VDCF), our management solution for creating, migrating, patching and monitoring Oracle Solaris environments. Our results showed VDCF to be 1.5x faster core-to-core on SPARC T7 compared to SPARC T5. JomaSoft views Oracle’s powerful SPARC M7 and T7 systems as ideal platforms for customer consolidation and virtualization projects, with technology and value that no other vendor can offer.

Technical details
We created a 8GB / 1 core LDom on a SPARC T5 Server running Solaris 11.3 with all data stored on a SAN Disk. Inside the LDom we installed our VDCF application and loaded datacenter configuration into the VDCF sqlite database. Next we executed datacenter analysis like patch comparison, calculated migration possibilities and server configuration consistency checks. The analysis are traditional single thread workload.

After the SPARC T5 tests we migrated our LDom to the new SPARC T7 Server. This allowed us to compare the systems using the same Operating System, Setup and Data, to make sure we compare “apple to apple”.

The results for our workload showed a 1.5x faster performance on the SPARC T7 Server. This workload did not use the Software In Silicon features, only performed better because of the new CPU architecture (higher frequency, more and better CPU cache and memory).

The Software In Silicon features can be used to optimize SQL and crypto functions when running applications In-Memory on the Oracle Database 12c. Performance increase of 80x or more are possible.