Servers: Data Center Performance with Oracle SPARC T4 "Breaking the Rules"

The new Oracle SPARC T4 server is "FAST, SCALABLE, SECURE, INTEGRATED and OPTIMIZED"

As enterprise computing grows more demanding, older datacenters struggle to keep pace. But with budgets tight, space at a premium and power costs going through the roof, how can you increase data center performance while minimizing operational overhead?

Only Oracle SPARC T4 servers combine best-in-class performance with real world business value.

1. World record performance for a wide range of critical enterprise applications.
2. Faster development and deployment with pre-tuned and certified optimized solutions.
3. No-cost virtualization for better system utilization and server consolidation.
4. High compute densities that conserve power, cooling and floor space.
5. Easy scalability through multiple form factors including blades.
6. Powerful security features for adding protection without hurting performance.
7. Seamless migration for your Oracle Solaris applications.
8. Up to 5x faster performance for a wide range of critical enterprise applications.
9. Complete integrated support with a single point of support accountability for the full Oracle stack.

Pressure on the data center has never been greater, with the business demanding faster performance, new applications and more capacity.

But as older SPARC servers start to struggle, how can you upgrade your data center affordably, securely and without disrupting the business?

Need more here is the ebook for the full story SPARC T4 Server

Cloud: How Oracle's Public Cloud Is Different

By building its public cloud on Exadata and Exalogic appliances and implementing monthly subscription-based pricing, Oracle seeks to challenge Amazon, Rackspace.

Oracle has made a commitment to cloud computing and it sounds serious. Oracle is unlikely to back off its announced cloud services because, unlike other cloud services, they're being offered from Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic appliances.

Oracle cloud services will run on the appliances in Oracle data centers. An Oracle partner, Japanese telecommunications supplier, SoftBank, is offering the same Oracle cloud software stack--on a similar hardware platform--assembled from Oracle's engineered appliances.

"The Oracle cloud is a little different," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in his announcement of the Oracle public cloud Wednesday during an afternoon address to the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 user conference in San Francisco. Built on appliances, Oracle's offering is different from Amazon Web Services, Terremark, and Rackspace. The latter build clusters of uniform, x86 commodity servers in racks as opposed to groupings of highly engineered appliances. But Ellison's primary point was that the Oracle cloud was "based on industry standards."

By that, he meant primarily Java, a language based on an international standard. Oracle's cloud runs any applications written in Java, whether those apps are custom enterprise versions or Oracle Fusion apps. Oracle's Siebel, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and E-Business Suite applications have been rewritten in Java to form the new Fusion line.

[Oracle is offering online CRM, Oracle applications as software as a service, and the ability to extend applications in the cloud. Is that making Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff nervous?]

"Don't try to port Java Enterprise Edition to the Salesforce cloud. It won't run," he said. He also applied the standards-based dictum to SAP, whose applications are built in Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP). (SAP's NetWeaver development platform supports use of both ABAP and Java.)

Oracle also uses Web service standards, such as SOAP, REST, and XML, to create its public interfaces to its cloud services. Virtual machines in the Oracle cloud will run under Oracle VM 3.0, which adheres to the open source codebase for Xen. With Oracle VM, Oracle cloud users "can manage thousands of virtual machines from one console," said Robert Shimp, group VP of product marketing, in a talk Thursday, the day after Ellison's announcement.

Oracle is different in another way. Unlike Amazon or Rackspace, which charge by the hour to run cloud workloads, Oracle will offer monthly subscriptions, which will come in different-sized packages. That difference may make it more difficult for customers to compare Oracle pricing to Amazon's.

Customers may include a database service, a Java application development service, a Java middleware service that includes the WebLogic application server, and various Fusion applications. Oracle also launched Oracle Social Network, which allows groups within the enterprise to set up impromptu teams, search and tag enterprise content, find prospective team members with needed expertise and co-edit documents. Social Network also forms a communications forum for working with consultants and partners outside the company.

Because Oracle is offering its applications as software available to run in its cloud, its approach can be described as software as a service. It will also work as a development environment, with Oracle offering NetBeans, JDeveloper, and Eclipse tools for developers to work with. When it comes to developing custom applications to run on the cloud, the Oracle cloud is functioning as a platform as a service.

Oracle's commitment to the cloud can be measured by the lead role that Shimp, one of Oracle's most experienced product marketing executives, took in explaining the cloud effort on last day of Oracle OpenWorld.In his talk at the Yerba Buena Arts Center auditorium, Shimp cited the partnership with SoftBank and urged his listeners to watch for the additional partners in the third-party space, of the caliber of a Savvis or AT&T in their role as cloud providers, he said.

Oracle Fusion applications that will be available in the cloud include: FusionCRM, Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) application, Fusion Talent Management, and Oracle Social Network. The latter can draw information out of CRM, HCM, and Talent in order to advise on the formation teams based on particular types of expertise. The Social Network application can also interface to mobile devices, including Apple's iPhone and iPad.

Both Ellison and Shimp played up the fact that Amazon's EC2 already offers a database service based on the Oracle engine, the same as the one Oracle is offering. Oracle databases and Oracle applications can run inside the enterprise, in the Oracle cloud, or in the Amazon cloud, Shimp pointed out.

The Oracle cloud provides load balancing, security measures, and elastic expansion and contraction to keep resources in line with demand, Shimp said.

While many customers will choose to run workloads on the Oracle appliances under Oracle Linux, Shimp pointed out they will also have the option of running them in the near future under Solaris. Solaris 11 on Sparc servers "will be available in a few weeks" as Solaris 11 becomes generally available.

Solaris offers containers, a different form of virtualization, compared to Oracle VM, Xen, or VMware on x86 servers. Under containers, a single Solaris host can quickly set up hundreds or thousands of virtual machines because each relies on the host's operating system kernel instead of establishing a separate operating system for its own use. As an intensely multithreaded system, Solaris 11 "will be able to instantly deploy thousands of virtual environments," Shimp said.

IT is caught in a squeeze between requests for new applications, services, and device support and demands from upper management to keep budgets lean, staffing light, and operations tight. These are irreconcilable objectives as long as we spend the vast majority of our resources on legacy services.

Hardware: SPARC SuperCluster versus IBM

Twice as Fast—SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 runs Java Applications and Oracle Database twice as fast as IBM Power 795. $3.3 Million Lower Purchase Price—A sample deployment of a similar IBM Power 795 and SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 can be $3.3 million less. 8X Better Price/Performance—Based on the SuperCluster T4-4 performance and price advantage, SuperCluster results in 8 times better price to performance than the IBM Power 795. Sources for Comparison of Systems: Systems cost based on server, software and comparable storage list prices (without discounts), as well as third party research. Performance comparison based on Oracle internal testing together with publicly available information about IBM Power 795 TurboCore system with highest processor speed commercially available (4.25 GHz) as of Sept 28, 2011.

Hardware: Engineered System for General-Purpose Computing

SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 delivers extreme performance and value.

The engineered system model that made Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud the fastest dedicated-purpose systems has come to general-purpose computing with the release of Oracle’s SPARC SuperCluster T4-4.

Introduced by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Oracle Executive Vice President John Fowler on September 26, 2011, at a live launch event, SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is based on the new SPARC T4 processor that has already achieved nine world-record benchmarks across a wide range of workloads.

SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 runs on both Oracle Solaris 11 and Oracle Solaris 10 and offers complete forward and backward application compatibility for the thousands of customers running applications on Oracle Solaris today. “We wanted to give [customers] a very smooth upgrade path, and that’s what the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is,” Ellison said at the event.

T4 AT THE CORE

The brain of the new SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is the new SPARC T4 processor, which is up to five times faster for single-threaded workloads than the SPARC T3 processor that it replaces, Ellison said. Fowler concurred, noting that the SPARC T4 family is “the biggest single-generation performance boost in SPARC history.”

The SPARC T4 processor integrates outof-order execution and dynamic threading to provide optimal performance regardless of an application’s execution profile.

The SPARC T4’s integrated cryptographic stream processing unit supports 16 industrystandard security ciphers without introducing processing overhead. The SPARC T4 processor also exploits the virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM Server for SPARC, enabling customers to improve system utilization while reducing space and power requirements.

ENGINEERED FOR PERFORMANCE

SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 can come equipped with either two or four SPARC T4-4 servers to provide up to 16 eight-core processors and 4 terabytes of memory in a single rack.

It includes redundant InfiniBand-attached ZFS storage clusters for high-performance network-attached storage, and Oracle Exadata Storage Servers for unmatched Oracle Database 11g performance. Because SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 integrates both hardware and software from Oracle, its strengths are magnified, Fowler said. “Many different companies could, potentially, put different racks of hardware together,” he said. “But what binds this together is the software.”

SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 has been optimized for running Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle VM Server for SPARC, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud software, and Oracle Database 11g.

The entire system is managed using Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, which is now bundled with Oracle Premier Support.

The net result of Oracle’s applicationsto-disk engineering is a system built and tuned for performance. “You cannot make a strong package out of a collection of weaker components,” Fowler said. “Here at Oracle we’ve been investing in SPARC and investing in Oracle Solaris to create these leadership technologies.”

IDEAL CONSOLIDATION PLATFORM

Because of the extreme performance and powerful virtualization built into SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, organizations can consolidate many existing applications onto one system while enjoying improved performance. Organizations can attach additional Exadata Storage Expansion Racks or their existing storage area network using an optional Fibre Channel adapter. And if even greater computing power is needed, up to eight SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 systems or Exadata Storage Expansion Racks can be interconnected.

“Oracle is changing the dynamics of the data center by combining the industry’s best technology—the SPARC T4 processor, Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle Exadata storage, and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud—into a versatile, secure, general-purpose engineered system,” Fowler said. “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.”