Solaris platform with Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series
The Solaris platform, including the Solaris 10 Operating System and OpenSolaris, has been extended to provide performance, energy efficiency and reliability enhancements for the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.
Solaris is designed to take advantage of large memory and multi-core/processor/thread systems and enables performance and scalability on Intel Xeon processors. Solaris ZFS provides data integrity, capability, performance and management and DTrace dynamic tracing framework allows close observation of system behavior, without degrading performance. In addition, Solaris Containers allow integrated virtualization with low overhead, at no cost. Solaris-based systems using the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series automatically leverage new Intel Quick Path Interconnect, Intel Turbo Boost and Intel Hyper-Threading technologies to further improve performance and scalability.
Sun and Intel have enhanced Solaris power management capabilities to leverage the power states of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, boosting energy efficiency by adjusting processor power on-demand in response to system utilization. The Power Aware Dispatcher, automatically monitors and optimizes a company’s system to maximize performance while minimizing power consumption. For example, it utilizes Intel’s new Deep C-States to reduce power consumed by idle cores.
Intel PowerTOP utilizes Solaris DTrace to let developers and administrators observe where applications may be preventing part of a system from going into a power-saving state and to monitor in real time how effectively a system is taking advantage of new processor power-management features like Intel Turbo Boost.
To improve reliability, the Solaris platform also provides predictive self-healing capabilities for systems based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. The Solaris Fault Management Architecture (FMA), which detects and automatically avoids repeated hardware faults in system components, has been extended to utilize status information from the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series.
Sun’s newest dual processor server based on Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, the Sun Fire X4270 (2 processors/ 8 cores/16 threads), running SAP ERP application Release 6.0 Enhancement Pack 4 (Unicode) with Oracle Database on top of Solaris 10 OS delivered the highest two-processor Unicode result on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark. Sun has been working with Unicode versions of SAP software for the past two years and has gained significant expertise in that area. This benchmark result highlights the optimal performance of SAP ERP software on Intel Xeon-based systems from Sun as well as seamless multilingual support available for SAP ERP applications.