Oracle unveils world’s fastest general purpose engineered system

The world’s fastest general-purpose engineered system was unveiled yesterday by Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison and Executive Vice President John Fowler.

Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is based on Oracle’s new SPARC T4 servers, which deliver the biggest generational performance increase in the history of Oracle’s SPARC processors, resulting in nine world record benchmarks.

The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 outclasses HP and IBM, delivering 2x the performance of IBM POWER7-based systems and HP Superdome 2 systems at half the cost running database and enterprise applications.

The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is a complete application-to-disk solution ideal for consolidating a broad spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications, offering outstanding efficiency with a 10:1 server consolidation ratio for heterogeneous database, middleware and Web applications.

The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 combines Oracle’s SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Solaris with the optimised database performance of Oracle Exadata storage cells, the accelerated middleware and application processing of the Exalogic Elastic Cloud software, and offers internal shared disk storage via Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage 7320 Appliance.

The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 will support all current Oracle Solaris applications and supports the latest release of Oracle Solaris, as well as the upcoming release of Oracle Solaris 11, thereby providing both forward and backward compatibility.

Unlike conventional solutions from the competition, Oracle’s new engineered system offers superior performance and economics for Oracle Database 11g, with built-in storage compression and security via storage encryption.

The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 delivers extreme performance and scalability, supporting up to four compute nodes and four terabytes of memory in a single rack, and has been provisioned to scale to an eight-rack system.

The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 also offers flexible, built-in virtualisation with Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM Server for SPARC with powerful management tools including Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Centre.    

As part of yesterday’s announcement, Oracle also unveiled two new SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 based Oracle Optimised Solutions which demonstrate the superior performance and value of Oracle’s fully integrated, pre-tested solutions:

Oracle Optimised Solution for PeopleSoft Human Capital Management on SPARC SuperCluster – 3x faster payroll processing than IBM and HP

Oracle Optimised Solution for WebCentre Content on SPARC SuperCluster – 3x lower cost and less complexity than IBM’s Content Management  

Oracle Optimised Solutions leverage Oracle’s unique ability to engineer and integrate key infrastructure components to help reduce integration costs, accelerate enterprise deployments, and simplify maintenance.

“The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is a really fast computer,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “It combines the latest in Extreme Parallelism and the latest in Extreme Compression to provide a 100 percent upwardly compatible migration path for existing SPARC customers. This one box moves data two times faster than IBM’s fastest computer at eight times better price/performance. This is a really fast computer.”  

“Oracle is changing the dynamics of the datacentre by combining the industry’s best technology – the SPARC T4 processor, Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle Exadata storage, and the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud software – into a versatile, secure, general purpose engineered system,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Oracle. “Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is an ideal platform for application and server consolidation that demonstrates how engineered systems can deliver huge performance at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions.”

“We chose to test Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster for performance improvement of our current data warehouse system and consolidation of sparse Oracle databases through implementation of RAC features,” said Aldo Chiaradia, CIO, Benetton Group S.p.A. “Our heaviest operation is data warehouse loading and with the SPARC SuperCluster we are expecting a huge improvement of at least 30 percent.”