Sunday, August 6

New JBoss platform

I'm currently in the process of evaluating a new JBoss platform for our company. A few months this would have been a quite simple task. But now with the new Intel Xeon 5100 "Woodcrest" processors on the market, it's a new ballgame.
The three different platforms I'm researching at the moment are:
My previous choice would have been the X4100 without question, the price/performance is good and it's a sort of common platform that can be used for other tasks as well if our needs would change.
Sun recently introduced a dual SAS disk kit for the T1000, which actually makes it usable as an app server, price wise it is slightly pricey (the 2x72Gb SAS kit is about 650GBP (1000USD)), and it's single PSU. The T2000 would have been a better choice but the cost is simly to high. The biggest benefit it gives is it's top speed with huge amounts of threads and the fact it runs Solaris. We're quite likely to run several Jboss instances on these boxes so running these in Solaris containers is quite a good benefit.
I presume most people have seen the amazing Intel benchmarks of the 5100-series CPU's. It just flies. Trust me here, I know a lot of you probably hate dell kit, but the Dell "9-series" is pretty darn good. Pretty decent remote management with the new DRAC/5 card (it is in fact better than the LOM in the galaxy line (X4100 etc)).

Quick summary (for midspec machines with 8Gb RAM, procs as listed and max number of 72Gb SAS disks and an extra dual port NIC in the 1950):
Sun X4100Sun T1000Dell 1950
ProcessorDual AMD 280 4-coresSPARC T1 8-coresDual Intel Xeon 5130 4-cores
Max memory16Gb16Gb32Gb
Disks4x SAS2x SAS4x SAS or 2x SATA
NIC4x GIG4x GIG2x GIG
PCI2 PCIe1 PCI2 PCIe or PCI-x
PSUDualSingleDual
Unit cost£4500£6000£3850
Support pa£420£850£110
3yr cost£5760£8550£4130

I'll post my decision when I make it. I have to say I'm leaning towards Dell at the moment.

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