TECHNOLOGY, Oracle's SPARC supercluster due by the end of the year

Oracle has its new SPARC T4 processor, combined with new hardware, which it hopes, will turn up the heat on server rivals Hewlett-Packard and IBM.
CEO Larry Ellison was as usual in feisty form, if he Central Monday on stage in Oracle to the products. He made several bold performance claims and said that he "look forward to is" competition for IBM customers.
The T4 is the newest addition to the SPARC processor family developed by Sun Microsystems, Oracle acquired last year. It has eight cores, down from 16 in the T3, but each core runs 1.65 GHz with up to 3 GHz, compared to the T3. This helps gives the T4 - five times the threaded performance of its predecessor, according to Ellison.
The SPARC-T4 is available in standard Rack-and blade servers, the price of US$ 16,000 to $160,000. It will be used also in the SPARC supercluster, a high end system, the 1,200 CPU threads be put the size of a server rack in a single system.
Oracle type not yet the prices for the SuperCluster, which it said last year initially. It would still a fixed delivery date, although John Fowler, executive Vice President of Oracle systems group, in an interview said that the product will be by the end of the year.
It resembles in some ways Oracle Exadata database machine and Exalogic elastic cloud. In all three cases Oracle says server, storage and network components, to optimize performance, and its software in integrated closely developed.
But while the SuperCluster is the Exalogic system to run middleware and the Exadata machine for online transaction processing and data warehousing, is designed for general purpose computing, including standard enterprise resource planning applications.
The computer contains four SPARC T4 server nodes, each with four Sockets; InfiniBand switch; ZFS storage devices; and Oracle Exadata storage servers. It can in a half-rack configuration, or as a full rack with 4 TB DRAM and to be purchased to 198TB hard disk space.
Up to eight racks can be linked together to a single system image, Ellison said. "This is a very big machine," he said.
Some of the components overlap with those in the database of the Exadata machine. But the SuperCluster has fewer Oracle's specialized database memory and instead adds default store. It devotes even more space to calculate power.
"Exadata more memory cells in a second rack add, if you want... but the original rack is a certain amount of Exadata storage for general storage to a more general purpose system," Fowler said in the interview.
"If you're going to run only the Oracle 11 database, Exadata definitely the product for you." ... But PeopleSoft or SAP or even created applications to run in the same cluster, could that with the supercluster but not with [Exadata database machine], ", he said." "This is the easiest way to define the difference."
Ellison claims that a complete SPARC-supercluster-rack can surpass IBM high-end-power-795 Server "by a long shot." IBM fell to everyone his comment on Monday. The SuperCluster has 42 GB / s memory bandwidth and 1.2 million input/output operations per second can run, Ellison said.
"Oracle much performance-oriented red meat to their installed base of loyal customers for SPARC and Solaris, throw is," said Dan olds Gabriel consulting industry analyst. "it promotes a set of benchmarks and comparisons with IBM and X 86-standard servers." "But it remains to be seen whether that's enough new customers to buy again to convince SPARC hardware."
The SuperCluster is a simple upgrade of existing SPARC systems. It is can be offered new Solaris 11 OS with Oracle but customers of 10, if they prefer, Fowler said. Solaris 11 range, contains improvements, the better higher thread count and faster I/o can process however.
If Oracle acquired first Sun, many questioned his commitment to the SPARC platform. But Ellison has made it a cornerstone of the strategy of Oracle, expensive, but high-performance construction machinery, to combine the Sun and Oracle technologies.
The company has a SPARC 5 processor on the roadmap. Fowler say not much about the chip Monday, with the exception that Oracle is before the date of the contract with its development.

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