Oracle wants to defeat competitors using Sparc T4

Oracle released the new Sparc T4 processor along with the new equipment which as the company hopes, will impair a little blood to competitors - Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Announcing new solutions, Larry Ellison was as usual energetic. He made several bold, theatrical statements and told that he looks forward to competitive struggle for clients of IBM.

T4 - the last addition in a processor family of Sparc developed by SUN Microsystems which Oracle purchased last year. It has eight main cores, in comparison with 16 in T3, but each core ​​ works at frequency up to 3 GHz, in comparison with 1.65 GHz in T3. According to Ellison, it helps T4 to provide fivefold one-line performance, in comparison with the predecessor.

A system on Sparc T4 is already available in a standard server rack and a form factor a blade at the price from $16 thousand to $160 thousand. It will also be applied in high-end to the Sparc SuperCluster system which is completed with processors on 1200 flows. The physical size of the device - in a server rack.

Oracle still does not disclose the price of SuperCluster which it for the first time mentioned last year. Also exact start date of deliveries is not reported though John Fowler, the executive vice president of the integrated systems of Oracle company, told in a recent interview that the product will appear by the end of the year. In the implementation a system is similar to Exadata Database Machine and Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Concerning all three products Oracle says that it densely coordinated the server, storage system and network components for optimization of performance and, besides, integrated with them the software.

However while the Exalogic system is created for start of a middle software (middleware), and the Exadata device - for the data warehouse and online transaction processing, SuperCluster is intended for the general calculations, including for standard applications of ERP.

As a part of the equipment four server T4 Sparc nodes, everyone with four sockets, the Infiniband switch; structures of ZFS storage and servers of Exadata storage. A system can be purchased in a half configuration or as a complete server rack from 4 Tb of memory of DRAM and to 198 Tb on the hard drive. A system can connect up to eight such racks, representing a uniform image, Ellison told. "It is very big machine", - he emphasized.

According to Ellison statements, the complete rack of Sparc SuperCluster can exceed "at a long distance" high-end the Power 795 server from IBM. IBM refuses to comment on his statements so far. Capacity of SuperCluster storage - 42 GB/sec., and performance to 1200 thousand transactions of input-output per second, Ellison told. In addition, the company has a diagram of creation of the Sparc 5 processor. Fowler almost did not mention him except that in his development Oracle goes ahead of schedule.

According to the analyst Dan Olds from Gabriel Consulting, Oracle offers a lot of "tasty" for loyal customers of Sparc and Solaris focused on productive calculations. "They carried out many tests and comparisons as with servers of IBM, and normal x86 servers. Let's look whether it is enough of it to convince clients – again to begin to purchase the equipment Sparc", - he noticed.