08 September 2016

Performance Comparison SPARC T4 and SPARC S7

SPARC S7
JomaSoft replaces the SPARC T4-1 Server with the new SPARC S7-2 Server (with 2 sockets / 8 cores each at 4.26Ghz).

Read more about the SPARC S7-2 Server

Comparison
We created a 3GB / 1 core LDom on our SPARC T4-1 Server running Solaris 11.3 SRU11 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 tests on the SPARC T4-1 we migrated our LDom to the new SPARC S7-2 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 2x faster performance on the SPARC S7-2 Server. We are very happy with this results. 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).

In my view the SPARC S7-2 Server is the ideal platform for customers to replace their old SPARC hardware with an excellent price / performance ratio.