Dell is out, and Sun and AMD are in at NewEnergy Associates.
In a customer win for both Sun Microsystems and AMD
, NewEnergy Associates is replacing its entire Houston data center, comprised of 22 Intel
processor-based servers, with two dual-core Sun Fire X4200 servers, part
of Sun’s Galaxy server line announced mid-September.
NewEnergy, an Atlanta-based provider of end-to-end energy IT and
consulting solutions for energy traders,
utility companies and power producers, said the Sun servers are powered by AMD’s dual-core, 64-bit Opteron processor and Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system.
“The transition to Opteron is a bit of work, and not everyone is convinced
that AMD has that unique performance edge, but the proof is in the numbers,”
David Simmons, a director in Sun’s Network systems group, told
internetnews.com. “I can tell you the demand [for Galaxy servers] is
huge. There’s a backlog.”
Dell unveiled
new dual-core Xeon servers earlier this month.
The four-way Dell PowerEdge
servers run on Intel’s latest dual-core, Xeon 7000 (code-named Paxville) MP
chips, but it’s not clear if NewEnergy had information on those systems
before deciding on Sun, or even whether the newer Dells would
have been considered.
“After 29 years of business, for the first time, NewEnergy is no longer
vendor agnostic. We owe it to our customers to recommend the virtually
unmatched price/performance and reduced heat generation of Sun’s x64 server
line powered by the AMD Opteron processor over all other tier-one vendors
evaluated,” Neal Tisdale, vice president of
software development at NewEnergy, at a company conference in May.
“The ability to upgrade to higher throughput dual-core CPUs
without increasing the heat output, and the flexibility to run Solaris OS,
Windows or standard Linux distributions, provides a great investment and a
dramatic decrease in operational costs.”
NewEnergy’s Houston data center performs CPU-intensive grid
computing simulations for its customers nationwide. The simulations mirror real-world
electric grids in order to help them plan for potential disasters.
The company said
trial results demonstrated that the Sun Fire X4200 servers were much faster than other servers. The company partially credits that speed to Solaris 10’s efficiency over memory-intensive
applications running Windows. Sun supports both Linux and Windows on the X4200, even though they’re not being used by NewEnergy.
“Sun’s new dual-core Sun Fire x64 servers have given us more compute
power than our older systems for a much lower price than competitive
offerings,” said Tisdale in a statement.
“Power consumption and cooling
costs were a big factor for us, and according to the projections we’ve run,
replacing up to eight Intel processor-based servers with one Sun Fire X4200
server can save us between 60 and 79 percent of power watts in energy usage and
can reduce heat output by 70 to 84 percent.”
Tisdale said NewEnergy would use the savings to install additional Sun
Fire X4200 servers.
The company’s Atlanta data center has also begun a pilot test and has
ongoing plans to consolidate up to eight physical single-CPU Intel
processor-based servers with one four-way Sun Fire X4200 server.
The Atlanta
data center currently houses 60 back-office servers that run high-memory
calculations for energy trading desks. NewEnergy said a recent test
demonstrated a 30 percent improvement in raw simulation times and one to
eight times savings in physical space.
