What, no watts?
For every system there comes the day when it’s trying to “find a
good home”, and the only reason I didn’t take one of those legendary
E10k to a cozy place at my home was its unmistakable greed for power.
Since its introduction a year ago I have been eager to get my
hands on one of those little miracles designed to reorganize
datacenters and cabinets alike.
My eagerness had seen a bit of dampening when my co-author had been
denied or rather,
never been called back
onto her application for a t&b system earlier this year, but when
announcements
for LDoms surfaced
(Oct 17,
same day), I couldn’t resist and
gave the application process a try of my own.
My to-do list for the trial period includes:
- Top of the list: Give LDoms and the hypervisor a try!
- A handful of experiments on zones, server to zone migration,
clustered zones, failover scenarios between them and their timing,
a different approach of operational rollback of a zone by its
underlying zfs filesystem, and more along these lines.
- More experiments on clustered zones for my Sun Cluster 3 book-in-writing.
- some real-life tests: migration of a handful of “old”
Sun Servers onto the T2000 - how well will it handle
having to deal SunRay services and a number of zones
with productive tasks, and a few for “playing and experiments” ?
I don’t expect any real problems there “for normal use”,
but how well does it scale, and when does it stop to
scale decently?
- Test if the System is able to handle course environments and
act as the server for the participants sessions while supplying
the environment for their labs. This alone would save a
tremendous amount of hardware to lug around between sessions…
Update: The T2000 has been the center of a recent
Solaris 10 intro session.
- Re-run some of the examples for the upcoming second edition of our
German book on OpenSolaris
on the T1 Platform, so Sun isn’t just represented by a few aged
Ultra60s and an IBM xSeries to boot!
(It had been impossible
to get a loaner or remote access during the time of writing —
reaction had been more like “So you’re writing a book on Solaris,
oh really.”)
- Update “Chapter 8”, describing the virtualization and consolidation
concepts of both Sun and IBM to cover Sun LDoms and the Sun hypervisor
in contrast to IBMs LPARs.
- Last but not least - Take the thing along to presentations and
courses held during the trial period, to spread the
“SWaP Virus”
and see how the T2000 does in different setups.
So let’s see. I filed my application for the trial…
Log
[/Solaris/T2000]
less and less power…
T2000 Try and Buy
Denis Sheahan reports
that even under forced load, power consumption
remains way below expectations. To avoid wasting power to mismatched
and overdimensioned Power Supplies, new systems are going to be
equipped with 450 Watt versions instead of the initial 550 Watt
ones.
While the individual savings may seem marginal compared to the deep
drop in power requirement represented by the Niagara systems in
comparision to the electric heating systems
they replace, even those comparatively small savings keep adding up.
[/Solaris/T2000]
Status
2006-12-31
Content is currently being reorganized from notes and logs - changing frequently during the next days until the end of the trial period in mid-January.
2007-01-03
Since there’s already two mails asking - yes, there’s a DVD LED - I’ll take a picture when the system is out of the rack this weekend one last time.
[/Solaris/T2000]
