Sun Rises On New SPARC Servers from Oracle
Sun Microsystems technology rises again as Oracle Corp. introduced its Solaris servers powered by a new 16-core SPARC T3 processor.
When Oracle first took over ailing Sun Microsystems in a $7.4 billion acquisition that closed in January, 2010, there was some question whether the SPARC line of CPU chips was going to be sold. Would CEO Larry Ellison actually continue the five-to-six years of research Sun had put into the latest member of the unique line of microprocessors that ran Sun's distinctive (and highly regarded) servers? They easily could have stayed with Sun's x86 servers, which are common in the marketplace, and sold the SPARC line to Fujitsu. Many former Sun employees held their breath.
The answer was apparent Thursday when Oracle trotted out its SPARC Supercluster T3-2 system complete with Solaris servers powered by the newly completed SPARC T3 processor. The Supercluster product line includes Oracle's new T3-2, 2-socket servers tied together via high-speed InfiniBand switching technology. Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster)—software that combines a large number of machines into one database engine—adds new heft to the system.
Sun's FlashFire is another breakthrough. It is a solid-state storage technology that allows data that would normally be on disk to be read to and written from main memory much faster. The refresh also includes four new T3-based servers: the T3-1 which is a 2-shelf, 1-socket box; the T3-1B, a single-socket blade unit; the T3-2, a 3-shelf, 2-socket server; and the T3-4, a 5-shelf, 4-socket powerhouse, which can run 512 concurrent threads.
The SPARC Supercluster, like Oracle's previously announced Exadata and Exalogic systems, uses InfiniBand technology, which moves data at up to 40 Gb per second. Right now, top Ethernet speeds are up to 10 Gb per second, so this is a giant step forward. The combination of Exalogic and Exadata can run Java applications up to 10 times faster than they can run on any other configuration, according to Oracle.
Oracle is certainly selling speed with the announcement of the SPARC units, claiming its new Supercluster can run the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) benchmarks three times faster than IBM's Power 780 server cluster with Power 7 processors and IBM's DB2 9.7 database. However, it's impossible to tell how fast Oracle's machines really run; many in the industry say the benchmark tests don't always correspond to real-world workloads.
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