Oracle, on Tuesday unveiled its Sparc T5 and M5 servers, the latest refresh to its mid-range and high-end Unix server portfolio, along with a new processor that Chris Armes, vice president, revenue product engineering system is billing as the world’s fastest. The new servers, which run Oracle Solaris, are geared toward running database, Java and enterprise applications with a much higher level of speed and performance than their predecessors, said Armes last week at an unveiling ceremony in Lagos. Armes further pointed out the new Sparc T5-8 server, which he said runs applications five times faster than Oracle’s highest-end T4 server.
It also runs Oracle’s Database and Middleware products faster than any other server in the vendor’s lineup, and it is significantly less expensive than IBM’s Power 780 server from a price-performance standpoint, he said. Under the hood is Oracle’s new Sparc 5 processor, which has set 17 world records in industry-standard benchmarking, Armes said at the event. The technology company achieved this advantage, he said, through consistent performance improvements that were “faster than anything from Intel, faster than anything from IBM.” “When Oracle bought Sun people thought Sparc was slow, they thought we would never catch up. We’ve done much better than catch up – we’ve passed the competition,” Armes further said.
Read also: Oracle sees fresh opportunities in data centre deployment
Oracle isn’t stopping there. He stated the vendor will continue to design processors that take into account the software running on them. Oracle will look to continue doubling performance every year and plans to start moving its software features, such as database and Java accelerators, onto the silicon, he said. Oracle, in the course of “intensive collaboration” with engineering teams, has managed to “execute a drumbeat of silicon” that’s geared toward optimising performance of the apps running on its servers, John Fowler, Oracle’s executive vice president of systems, said. “To my knowledge, no [company] has ever introduced, on the same day, two microprocessors and the whole [server] family around them,” Fowler said.
The new servers expand Oracle’s SPARC portfolio and enable near linear scalability from 1 to 32 sockets, with one common core, one operating system, and one common set of systems management and virtualization tools, making them ideal platforms for building clouds. The servers also easily address multiple application requirements and quickly meet demanding service level agreements. The new SPARC servers and Oracle Solaris deliver mainframe-class reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS), with the Oracle Solaris Guarantee Program for binary and source compatibility to ensure the highest levels of enterprise application availability and backwards compatibility to run a broad range of new and existing enterprise applications.
