Web Server Hardware (SPARC or x64) ?

[kHz]

Say I need to scale some web servers that currently are running on two 480s (don't ask) and need to replace them with eight new web servers.

Would eight v210s, which are SPARC, and dual-CPUs, with 8 GB of memory be a good choice?

OR

Would eight X4100s, which are x64 (Opteron), with a single-dual core CPU, with 8 GB of memory be a better choice? Or what about two dual-core CPUs in the X4100s?

The servers will eventually go to Apache but for the short term will run Weblogic Express Server. The servers will need to handle 200,000 requests during a peak hour.

Any thoughts on what is the best for speed and throughput for web servers?

Thanks.

 

[SamBones]

You should look at the new Sun Fire T2000. It has multiple multi-core mulit-thread CPUs, so it looks like 32 CPUs to the OS. It's a relatively inexpensive machine that can have a lot of threads getting CPU concurrently. They also draw very little power and run pretty cool. You can also get one for 60 days from Sun to try it out.

http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t2000/

The only issue I've had with it is that Solaris 10 is new to us. There are some significant changes in Solaris 10 that we bumped into. One issue, we were getting poor network performance from a certain program. We discovered that Solaris 10 has an IPTables firewall turned on by default and it was slowing this one app. Turning it off made it fly.

 

[kHz]

The T2000 would be a great server and it appears it would meet the needs and would offer future horizontal scaling, if needed. Plus, if one server was overly busy, another CPU or memory could be allocated on-the-fly to satisfy the immediate requirement.

I will look into the company getting a server for trial.

Thanks.