Work loads for Niagara: Customer Deployments of Sun Niagara CMT Systems One Year On

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This paper explores customer adoption of the Niagara processor since its market introduction in December 2005, focusing on the range of workloads that are running today on this chip multithreaded (CMT) platform. In addition, IDC has interviewed customers who have adopted Niagara to learn about the IT requirements that Niagara addresses — and the deployment patterns found in those sites.

Sun Microsystems has innovated in the area of multicore processor technology, introducing its Niagara processors in December 2005. Each processor contains eight cores, and each of those cores supports four threads, or streams, of jobs. This means that any single Niagara processor can support up to 32 independent threads of processing, making it an efficient engine to host parallelized, multithreaded workloads. These types of workloads are typical for commercial use, such as in Web servers, Java environments, application servers (app servers), databases, and network infrastructure.

Since its launch, the Niagara-based line of systems has shown one of Sun’s fastest ramps for new products. The systems have been adopted both within the Sun installed base and by new customers. Key drivers for that adoption include increased performance in more dense deployments — requiring less space within the datacenter — and smaller thermal "envelopes" due to lower levels of power dissipation. Efficiency of deployment is based on the combination of lower power and cooling requirements — and smaller space requirements within datacenter racks. Sun calls this "CoolThreads" technology due to the low power and cooling requirements of Niagara-based UltraSPARC T1 CMT-based systems, compared with earlier generations of multicore processor technology.