Sun CoolThreads Technology Powers New Generation Of Applications At Hactl

Published 20th June 2006

World's largest air cargo terminal exploits revolutionary capabilities of UltraSPARC T1 chip multi-threading processor...

Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Ltd (Hactl) is using Sun Microsystems' Sun Fire T2000 servers to run the first of a new generation of applications that employ a highly-componentised architecture and a web-based interface. Hactl is one of the first sites in Asia to put T2000s into production and has also deployed them as application development platforms.

Sun Fire T2000 servers feature patented CoolThreads technology within their UltraSPACR T1 processor – the industry's first eight core, 32-thread processor – which has set new standards for performance, energy and space efficiency. Hactl's new Vehicle Information System II (VIS II) system, which went into production at the beginning of the month, uses four T2000s running the Solaris 10 Operating System and Sun Java System Web Server to provide a highly responsive web interface to thousands of users inside and outside the company.

"For us Sun's CoolThreads technology could not have appeared at a better time," said Andy Bien, Hactl's General Manager of Information Services. "In order to increase business flexibility and improve customer service we are breaking our applications into multiple components and providing a web-based interface. This has a knock-on effect in terms of the number of conventional servers needed in both development and production. "Our data centre was built with a 10-year view but changes in technology, which are always unpredictable, have resulted in it becoming rather packed and that is a concern for us. The Sun Fire T2000 servers are compact, energy-efficient and can do the job of several conventional machines."

Hactl was in the first wave of Hong Kong companies to evaluate the multithreading performance and data centre-friendly power and space requirements of Sun's new UltraSPARC T1-based servers, taking delivery of a test unit early in the year. It subsequently ordered a dozen T2000s and these units were immediately put to work as development platforms when they were delivered in March.

Hactl initiated its programme to migrate applications to an n-tier architecture in 2004 and VIS II is the first web-centric application to go live. CoolThreads technology makes the T2000s particularly suited for running web-tier components since their performance greatly benefits from multithreading.

According to Bien there may be as many as five versions of each application component within Hactl's software lifecycle, from coding through various stages of testing to production. The company had been hosting each stage of the coding and testing on a separate server in order to simulate the production environment.

"The mutlicore, multithreading processor enables us to partition the T2000s so we can run multiple development and testing environments on the same machine which simplifies things and saves a lot of space and power in the data centre. It also eliminates occasional problems we've had with slightly different versions of Solaris running on different machines as we can now ensure a consistent platform across our development process," said Bien.

With VIS II now successfully deployed, Hactl plans to roll out additional web-based applications in the coming months as part of its never ending quest to raise capacity at its SuperTerminal 1 by increasing automation. According to Bien, Sun Fire T2000s will be Hactl's standard platform for running web-tier components.