Sparc Supercluster Fro Oracle

Oracle is showing its commitment to the Sun Microsystems hardware it acquired in a $7.4 billion takeover this year by introducing Solaris servers powered by the new 16-core Sparc T3 processor.


The product line upgrade introduced Thursday includes a new Supercluster that can include dozens of rack-mount, T3 servers tied together through Oracle's high-speed InfiniBand switching fabric, Oracle's Real Application Clusters software and Sun's FlashFire solid-state storage acceleration technology. The refresh also includes an Exalogic Elastic Cloud T3-1B, a hardware/software product that makes heavy use of flash memory, up to five terabytes. The solid-state memory boosts performance significantly by serving as a giant cache storing business logic and the data that it's working with.

The entire Exalogic system can be connected to Oracle's Exadata database machine or storage arrays using the company's InfiniBand technology, which is capable of moving data at 40 GB per second. The combination of Exalogic and Exadata allows Java applications to run up to 10 times faster than on other hardware/software configurations, according to Oracle.
The latest announcements make good on Oracle's promise to use Sparc T3 chips in next generation Sun servers running the Solaris operating system. The latest processor delivers significantly higher performance, Oracle says. 

Speed is certainly a focus with the new systems. Oracle claims its new Supercluster running the company's Database 11g is three times faster in online transaction processing than IBM's Power 780 server cluster with Power7 processors and IBM's DB2 9.7 database. Oracle based its claims on tests approved by the Transaction Processing Performance Council, which listed the results on its website. What isn't known is how Oracle achieved that speed mark and whether it represents a real-life situation.