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

JEE7: Looking ahead to a new era

Get educated about Java EE 7 JSRs.

With the release of Java EE 7 scheduled for the second half of 2012, projected JSRs are all up and running. The Java EE 7 release, which will reflect the evolving needs of the industry as it moves into the cloud, is date driven: anything not ready will be deferred to Java EE 8.

Here is an update and summary of the key features of different specifications in the Java EE 7 platform.

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: 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.”

OS: Oracle Solaris 11 The First Cloud OS!

Oracle Solaris 11 provides virtualization, availability, and security for next-generation cloud computing environments.

Oracle has officially unveiled Oracle Solaris 11, the world’s first cloud operating system (OS). The result of more than seven years of intense research and development, this latest iteration of the most widely installed enterprise UNIX provides more than 400 new features that 

enable organizations to deploy private,  public, and hybrid cloud environments that 

are highly scalable, available, and secure.

Oracle President Mark Hurd formally introduced Oracle Solaris 11 during a live event from New York City’s Gotham Hall on November 9, 2011, and the OS was released that day for SPARC and x86-based systems.

(Oracle Solaris 11 was previewed at Oracle OpenWorld 2011.) “Oracle Solaris 11 represents Oracle’s commitment to the best of breed at every level of the architecture,” said Hurd. “To put this in context, this is also part of a greater Oracle strategy and a greater overall R&D commitment we’ve made to [the Sun] portfolio.” Other recent demonstrations of that strategy and commitment include the SPARC T4 processors and the SPARC SuperCluster servers.

Next-Generation Clouds
John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle—also on hand at the event—said that Oracle Solaris 11 is designed not just for current enterprise systems but also for the next generation of enterprise systems and cloud environments. “These systems will support large-scale, mission-critical ERP [enterprise resource planning] and high-throughput OLTP [online transaction processing] applications,” he said. 

“These systems will have thousands of threads, hundreds of terabytes of memory, and double digit gigabyte network performance.” A key requirement for these next generation systems is virtualization. “As people go into cloud environments, they will go from hundreds and thousands of physical machines into environments where they will have tens and hundreds of thousands of virtual machines,” Fowler said.

With Oracle Solaris 11, virtualization is not a separate product that has to be layered into a system’s architecture—it is integrated right into the OS. In addition to being the first cloud OS, Oracle Solaris 11 is also the first fully virtualized OS, with server, storage, and network virtualization all built in.

Oracle Solaris 11’s virtualization technology also provides the high availability (HA) that clouds require—99.999 percent availability, according to Fowler. “Users don’t have to install HA features at each level of their stack because with Oracle Solaris 11 they’re already built in,” he said.

Data at Cloud Scale
Oracle Solaris 11 also offers advanced data management especially designed for the cloud environment. To accomplish this, Fowler said, Oracle Solaris 11 moves common data services—flash-enabled pools, encryption, replication, duplication, and deduplication—to the OS. 

Moving these services, commonly performed in storage systems, to the OS improves performance and increases storage efficiencies, he said.

Fowler said that users should expect continuous improvements in Oracle Solaris 11 and other Sun product lines. “Our roadmap is on track, and we remain committed to Oracle Solaris and to delivering two times the performance every two years,” he said.

Cloud: Introduction to Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS)

Introduction
Around 1960, after successfully installed the 1st packet switching based network (ARPANET), J.C. R. Licklider envisioned the concept of ‘Intergalactic Computer Network’ where the globe can be encircled by the complex net of all computers in the world. In the same era, John McCarthy, introduced the concept of utility computing in which computer can be used like other utilities for e.g. electricity, telephone etc. These two visionary concepts put the foundation of what is better known today as Cloud Computing.
This article is written with an aim to introduce the concept of cloud computing and explore in depth one of its widely accepted and useful model i.e. Software as a Service (SaaS).

Cloud ComputingCloud Computing is a concept in which computing resources are made available on the internet and consumed by the clients as a demanded service. In-line with the other concepts in computing like grid, distributed and utility computing, cloud computing is a concept and different people have explained, defined and implemented it in different ways, but one of the best definition which could comprehensively defined cloud computing is

“Cloud Computing is the provisioning of dynamically scalable and often virtualized computing resources as demanded services over the internet”

Cloud computing has 3 major variant or models depending on the resources being exposed as service to the client. These are briefly defined below.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): In this model, the development platform is made available to the clients as demanded service over internet. The software, development and testing tools, configuration management tools, databases and all other required tools and APIs are provided by vendor in their environment. Developers can create, deploy and test the product in the provider’s platform. One of the best examples is the services provided by sales force (www.salesforce.com/platform)
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): In this model the complete IT infrastructure is made available in cloud as demanded services. This includes varieties of hardware, heterogeneous OS, globally distributed environments, commonly used enterprise solutions like HR, Payroll etc, data storage along with services like data security, authentication/authorization, backups, upgrade etc. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a good example of this category.
Software as a Service (SaaS): The most useful and wide accepted model in cloud computing is Software as a Service. In this model the software is exposed as demanded service over the cloud. Below section describe this model in depth along with its critical characteristics.

Software as a Service (SaaS)Software as a Service model is a beautiful bouquet in which the concepts are picked up from different areas including Application Service Provider (ASP), hosted Solutions, Utility Computing, Virtualization and many more.
In SaaS model, vendor expose centrally managed software as on-demand service to the clients over Internet. This is against the orthodox in-premise or distributed model in which vendor distribute and install software in client’s environment and made it locally available.
SaaS model can further be understood by considering its top 10 characteristics†.

1. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): One of the important properties of any cloud computing model is ‘service’. In SaaS model the software is exposed as a service to the customer. This necessitates the adoption of service oriented architecture in the application.
2. Hosted Environment: SaaS solutions are more often managed centrally and made available in hosted environment rather than at each client’s location.
3. Virtualization: SaaS solutions should be deployed in virtual environment to support scalability, smooth upgrade and decoupling with underlying hardware.
4. Multi-tenancy: SaaS solutions are believed to be deployed using multi-tenancy architecture where single application instance and data model is shared within multiple clients.
5. Provisioning and Metering: SaaS solution should be provided with easy mechanism for tenant provisioning and metering the usage of the services.
6. Service Elasticity: SaaS solution is said to be on-demand based services. Which means client should be able to use as little or as much as services as the business needs.
7. Scalability: As SaaS solutions are deployed globally and provide elastic services, scalability becomes an essential characteristic of such solutions. More often, such solutions are deployed in cluster of virtualized server which can be add/remove services to meet the demand.
8. Upgradability: SaaS solution should be provided with centralized easy upgradability. This include software and hardware upgradability.
9. SLA Driven: SaaS solutions are driven by coherent licensing agreement based on per user per access basis.
10. Availability and Self Healing: SaaS solutions are committed to provide complete availability and with failover mechanism. In case of failure, there will be a hot backup instance of the application ready to take over without disruption.

† Note that most of these characteristics are common for all models of cloud computing and hence can also be read as characteristics of cloud computing model.

Advantages of SaaS Model
SaaS solution uses multiple concepts and ideas to provide low cost business solutions. Some of the notable advantages associated with SaaS model are listed below.

1. SaaS provide low cost solution. Businesses can obtain licenses to use software as per need basis.
2. Customers can use service on pay-for-what-you-need basis depending on business needs.
3. SaaS model avoid overhead of managing IT resources including software and hardware resources and hence facilitate organization to focus on the business.
4. SaaS being web-native, thin clients like browsers may be used to access the software. Hence further reduces the cost at client end.
5. SaaS solutions can easily be integrated with available business solutions at client end.
6. SaaS solutions are scalable and virtualized. Providers can increase decrease the servers depending on service demand without changing the software architecture.
7. Being designed in multi-tenant architecture, SaaS solution enables multiple customers and users to access the shared application and data model.

Challenges with SaaS Model:
Although SaaS model has many advantages to the business, it comes with few challenges as well which are listed below.

1. As SaaS model is centrally managed and made available in hosted environment, it requires organizations to make valuable business data available in cloud, which could be a major threat.
2. Security, integrity and reliability of critical business data is in vendor’s hand.
3. Being a network-based access, the availability of a SaaS solution is subjected to network availability.
4. Performance can be an issue as all request goes through cloud.
5. One of the major concerns with this model is that not all software can be exposed as services.
6. The last, but an important point is related with the fine terms and conditions mentioned in the agreement, which may be dangerous to the business sometimes. An article mentioning some of these terms is available here: http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/07/03/who-owns-your-online-documents/
   

Conclusion
Cloud Computing exposes computing resources (hardware and software) and services over internet as demanded services which help organizations by providing low cost IT solutions. Software as a Service model enables clients to use software as services over cloud and pay as per the usages. SaaS eliminates the need for software installation and maintenance at the client end and allows organizations for focus on core business activities