Sun Fire T1000 “Eco-Efficient” Server

Sun has a line of “eco-efficient” server that looks like it would nicely meet the needs of green web hosting providers. Check out the Sun Fire T1000.

Sun claims this thing has all sorts of bells and whistles..

“At A Glance

• Record-breaking performance, unequaled energy efficiency, and space-saving compute density


• The best rack-optimized 1RU server for massively horizontally scaled web environments


• UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology offers six or eight cores with four threads per core


• Delivers more than five times the throughput per rack of Xeon-based servers running Java applications


• Over 2x throughput of a dual processor Xeon processor server with 5x the server efficiency measured by the new SWaP (Space, Watts and Performance) metric


• A range of Linux distributions have been certified for the UltraSPARC T1 processor. Please click here for more information.


• Available as a Sun System Pack, which combines the Sun Fire T1000 with the right services as one offering“

You can see the performance benchmarks here. They claim that “Sun Fire & Sun SPARC Enterprise Servers with CoolThreads technology deliver breakthrough levels of performance with dramatic power and space savings, as demonstrated by the raft of World Record benchmarks.” Sounds good to me if it is true.

There are 4 reviews on the site currently, scoring an overall 3.5 out of 5. Here are some bits of the reviews:

“By Ben, the Mortician from Los Angeles, CA on 8/22/2006



Best Uses: Application Servers, Web server, Systems Integration

Pros: High Performance, Highly Scalable, Amazing Ruby Performance, Good Value

Cons: Not for every Workload

Prooved to be an excellent platform for deployment of Ruby on Rails, Apache web server, and Tomcat.

The box performed excellently, as it's threaded architecture consided well the process based model in which our application deploys with. It has the best price/performance of any of the other boxes we tested.

Also suprising, it provides great Netbackup thruput and handles threaded system integration apps (Splunk for example) very well..

That said - for certain apps (the database part of our application, image processing, etc.), it performed poorly. Hence why it runs on Opteron.

With this boxes, it's all about picking the right tool for the right job. A philips versus a flat, pipe wrench versus a hammer.... you get the idea.”

“By Colofoxyus! fromMexico on 8/8/2006

Pros: Highly Scalable, High Performance, Good Value

Excelent! Cool Threads are the best!”

“By Jeff Schave [...]from USA on 8/7/2006

Best Uses:Web serving, E-mail, DNS

Pros:Good Value, Small Footprint, Highly Scalable

Cons:No second power supply

The T1000 now ships with either 2×73 GB SAS disk drives or 1 80 GB SATA drive. SAS drives will offer much better performance for some types of applications, and the second disk drive will reduce a point of failure in this model.

About the only thing this box is missing is a second power supply.”

“By Thorleif Wiikfrom Berlin, Germany on 7/24/2006

Best Uses:Web server

Pros:High Performance, Small Footprint

Cons:Only one Hard Disk

The Sun T1000 might be a cool product. But why is there only one Hard Disk Slot?

It would be a great product with two hot pluggable 2,5 SAS drives like the sun Fire X4100.”

Sorry folks, but I think the last thing someone designing a low power server is going to include is more power supplies and more hard drive slots.

One of the things that makes me most happy on Sun's site for this product though, is the neato Sun Fire T1000 energy use calculator that allows you to see how much energy different configurations of the Sun Fire T1000 will use. This includes different memory, processor, and hard drive configurations.

End Note: I'd buy a crate full if I had the cash