ACADEMIA

Fabric7 Systems, a company that has achieved a fundamental breakthrough in server design, announced it has set new standards of performance on the SPECjbb2005 (Java Server) computing benchmark with its Q160 enterprise server. The results of the benchmark testing, published on the SPEC Web site, clearly establish that the company's next generation architecture delivers enterprise scalability on industry standard hardware and operating systems -- bringing the economics of x86 systems and Linux to the core of the datacenter. Fabric7 achieved the first truly scalable SPECjbb2005 Linux results, with the findings clearly demonstrating the major advances in performance that Fabric7's unique server design delivers, including: -- Industry record results for x86 server scalability with a 300 percent advantage over alternative x86 servers; -- The industry's first scalable and hardware partitionable server that can be configured as 2-core, 4-core, 8-core or 16-core and deliver from 32,378 to 148,210 bops (business operations per second); -- 124 to 151 percent superior performance over comparable mid-range (4- core) x86 servers; -- 66 to 185 percent the performance of comparable systems running proprietary Unix operating systems and RISC processors with 8 to 16 cores. "Fabric7 is showing customers that the days of having to rely on expensive, proprietary processors and operating systems are over," said Sharad Mehrotra, CEO and co-founder of Fabric7. "With these results we've proved that the Fabric7 architecture enables a level of scalability and performance on x86 platforms that easily competes with more expensive, proprietary systems that have traditionally dominated the midrange and high-end of the server market. By offering this scalability to customers at three to five times lower cost, we are dramatically shifting the economics of enterprise computing." Fabric7's enterprise servers, the Q160 and Q80, feature the company's fabric computing architecture that combines sophisticated Q-Par(tm) partitioning technology and hardware accelerated virtualization to deliver the market's best performing SMP servers running Linux with industry standard processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). In addition, the Q160 incorporates an advanced internal I/O subsystem, allowing for multiple systems to be linked together in a wholly dynamic, extremely low-latency fabric. This unique design enables enterprise customers to create entirely independent and hardware-isolated servers that combine computing power, networking, storage access and offload engines in a matter of minutes -- making the datacenter significantly more flexible, simple and efficient. Fabric7's SPECjbb2005 Results The following results are published on the SPEC Web site. SPECjbb2005 (Java Server Benchmark) is SPEC's benchmark for evaluating the performance of server side Java. SPECjbb2005 evaluates the performance of server side Java by emulating a three-tier client/server system. The benchmark exercises the implementations of the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler, garbage collection, threads and some aspects of the operating system. It also measures the performance of CPUs, caches, memory hierarchy and the scalability of shared memory processors (SMPs). Performance is measured as "business operations per second" (bops) as defined by SPEC. Server and Configuration SPECjbb2005 Results Fabric7 Q160 server with 16 cores, 8 sockets 148,210 bops Fabric7 Q160 server with 8 cores, 4 sockets 95,587 bops Fabric7 Q160 server with 8 cores, 8 sockets 87,685 bops Fabric7 Q160 server with 4 cores, 4 sockets 56,119 bops Fabric7 Q160 server with 4 cores, 2 sockets 54,761 bops Fabric7 Q160 server with 2 cores, 2 sockets 32,378 bops