Sun Microsystems have launched a Try and Buy scheme on their new Niagara servers. Since my memories of Niagara consist of Marilyn Monroe soaked through by the falls in a fetching yellow raincoat I had great hopes of this new server (the T2000) which has just arrived. I like the Sun Opteron servers which we use for database and web servers but we are looking for a server to replace our ageing SGi Octane and Sun Netra servers.
Easy to unpack – although nowhere is a large red warning saying have a look at the website before you unpack this. The website is stuffed full of information which everyone will read once they have a problem in getting the server up and running. Although I still like to have a 10 page guide to get me up and running with an IP connection.
I can confirm that a drenched Marilyn Monroe in raincoat isn’t in the box.
So machine turned on and blinking lights (amber and green) – dual power supply and 4 network ports, serial port to get the serial console up to allow me to get the network management console up (telnet access which means I don’t freeze my ass off in the racks – although trying to find a telnet that works these days is more difficult as all the machines use ssh and telnet ports are blocked).
Get a system console on my terminal and watch it rebooting with my ‘poweron’ command -
takes ages to reboot – don’t know yet if this is a good thing (maybe if it spends more time at the start it won’t crash…) ok it continues
Lots of languages but no Arabic – now I can’t show off with my new found Arabic lessons (what is the Arabic for ‘Configuring network interface addresses’?)
The ANSI terminal emulator on my ssh shell really doesn;t like the setup – can’t see if I change the setup but blindly struggling through. So DNS was a bit of a struggle as it had decided at some point to call the machine arabicarabic instead of just arabic. Still at least it set the time and date correctly (hey I like the small things).
It tells me it is a Sun Fire T200, (one of its zeros is missing – this is far too The Man With Two Brains)
Reboots and has Java Enterprise System preloaded (nice). I do have to type installer – nodisplay though (ok it is preloaded and no preinstalled) – still have to select language (the old enemies German, Japanese and Korean/Chinese) are there but no Arabic – gee don’t they have most of the oil?
OK I haven’t a clue what to install so just go for them all (apache and tomcat would be good) there are enterprise portal servers and everyth8ing – it works out the dependencies and seems to take away some stuff. Now it wants to remove bundled products – is this a good deal? Sun ONE Application Server and Message Queue Platform are being binned – such a short acquaintance.
Choosing defaults – where can I go wrong…. Configure later – that sounds good lets go!
Wow it only needs 547M for oodles of stuff – almost an ANSI screenful – glad I chose to install everything.
The machine has 8G of RAM and 8 cores and there are 2 disks 72G in size c3t0d0 and c3t1d0 (the second disk doesn’t appear to be mounted), 4 1G network ports.
It has crypto acceleration for SSL enabled by default.
/usr/sfw/bin/openssl speed rsa1024 rsa2048 -engine pkcs11 -multi 32 is suggested for benchmarking so I get
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 1024 bits 0.0002s 0.0001s 6312.7 16061.9
rsa 2048 bits 0.0008s 0.0001s 1261.0 8838.4
I ran the same thing on my mini-mac
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 1024 bits 0.007917s 0.000405s 126.3 2466.5
rsa 2048 bits 0.047819s 0.001231s 20.9 812.4
And on my Alienware Opteron 246
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 1024 bits 0.003793s 0.000156s 263.6 6403.0
rsa 2048 bits 0.019552s 0.000592s 51.1 1690.4
Also run it on an aging SGi Octane
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 1024 bits 0.0367s 0.0021s 27.3 474.0
rsa 2048 bits 0.2454s 0.0076s 4.1 131.4
and a cobalt qube (before sun bought them over)
sign verify sign/s verify/s
rsa 1024 bits 0.0344s 0.0019s 29.0 538.4
rsa 2048 bits 0.2224s 0.0068s 4.5 147.8
Big speed for the Niagara machine (unsurprisingly) – if you need to do a LOT of SSL this is the baby for it.
Formatted the second disk with write cache enabled and created my home directory on it.
Loaded Ruby On Rails and tried to compile it – no compiler – however the surprise is that gcc is installed already
Installed Mono which is a package available for sunos8 (it does say there may be a sunos 10 verison in the future and that it should work)
Configuration is this (from the Sun site)
T20-108A-08GA2C
Sun Fire T2000 Server, 8 * Core 1.0 GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor,8 GB DDR2 memory (16 * 512 MB DIMMs), 2 * 73 GB 2.5-inch 10000 RPM SAS disk drives, 1 DVD-ROM/CD-RW slimline drive, 2 * (N+1) PSUs, 4 * 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports, 1 * Serial port, 3 * PCI-E slots, 2 * PCI-X slots, Solaris 10 and Java Enterprise System software pre-installed
which on the Sun site is priced at 8.4K UKP plus VAT of course
Mono installed, ran out of space but then sorted out the second disk with the partition command in the format command and newfs’d it. Way yoo – 68G to play with.
Ruby on Rails compilation – Niagara versus mini mac [configure and compilation]
The Sun seemed much slower (kinda expected it to rattle through compilations) and then broke when ar wasn’t found (used gar manually). The mac compiled it all through ready for installation ( I have found MacOSX and open source software to be friends). Finally coaxed the sun to compile ruby – now I have a direct comparison with the mac for benchmarking!
Mono installed ok and I ran our IMS on it – however it needed ODBC access and then I found out how much ODBC drivers were for Solaris! 2.5K for an ODBC driver that I paid 50 dollars for on a Mac.
So far it kicks ass in terms of SSL but I am not seeing it vastly faster in day to day use.
Compiling postgresql takes ages – there is a solaris 10 optimised postgresql coming out which is interesting.
