SYSTEMS

Sun Microsystems today announced it has worked closely with SAS, the leader in business intelligence, to achieve a second, world-record ETL performance benchmark. The Sun Fire E25K server running high-powered UltraSPARC IV+ processors and the Solaris 10 Operating System(OS), the world's most advanced operating system, teamed with the recently released SAS Enterprise Data Integration Server solution to show throughput leadership for the extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) of massive volumes of data into a data warehouse. For this benchmark, a Sun Fire E25K server with 48 1.5 GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processors handled 4.29 terabytes (TB) of raw data in less than 70 minutes, yielding 3.9 TB an hour of sustained throughput. Sun StorageTek 3510FC arrays were utilized to provide high read/write storage bandwidth and connectivity to multiple host domains, and Solaris 10 OS provided the ability to deliver high performance even at 100 percent system utilization. Many large enterprises often deploy a multi-partitioned Sun Fire E25K server to serve disparate departmental needs such that high levels of RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) can be easily provided. While the departments might be disparate, they often need to access the same data warehouses generated from corporate-wide transactional sources. SAS Enterprise Data Integration Server allows the utilization of multiple domains during off/non-peak times for the warehouse load. A high performance server requires a high performance I/O subsystem and the storage configuration is critical in the most demanding data intensive ETL applications. Sun StorageTek QFS software provided a high performance file system necessary to achieve the extremely rigorous I/O throughput requirements. Additionally, the QFS shared read/write capability tremendously simplifies data management constraints for applications which need coherent read/write access from multiple grid nodes without inducing performance overhead of typical shared file systems. The Sun Fire E25K has up to 72 dual core UltraSPARC-IV+ processors, 576GB of RAM and 72 I/O channels in a shared memory (SMP) architecture. The hardware partitioning capability of the Sun Fire E25K server when combined with the Solaris Containers creates an ideal compute node that can be used to run medium- and large-scale compute tasks. The Sun Fire E25K is binary-compatible with current and previous Sun SPARC servers. The Sun Fire E25K server provides software investment protection by supporting Solaris 8, 9, 10 operating systems, in addition to nearly a decade of binary compatibility between Solaris releases. It also provides hardware investment protection by allowing the mixing of up to three generations of UltraSPARC processors. More information on the benchmark results can be found at: its Web site.