14 DAY TRIAL // In the last few years the high performance database sever market has been the playground of companies such as IBM and HP, but Oracle is set to challenge that with its new SPARC Supercluster that was built by its subsidiary Sun and features no less than 1,728 processor cores.
Compared to other database servers that are available out there, Oracle's SPARC Supercluster comes as a complete infrastructure solution designed to run Oracle's own database RAC environments, built using SPARC T3 and M5000 servers as well as Sun ZFS Storage 7420 servers, and Sun Network ZFS InfiniBand Gateway Switches.
The end result is a system that can perform up to 30 million database transactions per minute, this number being three times faster than the previous record held by IBM’s DB2 on a P7 cluster, the 108 SPARC T3 chips coming with a total of 1,728 processor cores.
Furthermore, the system also comes with 13TB of memory, 246TB of flash storage and 1.7 petabytes of total storage capacity, the SPARC Supercluster running the Solaris operating system.
What's more impressive however is how little time has taken Oracle to build this impressive system as the company has acquired Sun in January 2010.
Usually such high performance computing solutions take years to develop and manufacture but Oracle has managed to this in less than a year proving the power of the SPARC architecture virtually overnight.
“The SPARC Supercluster is a new family of general purpose machines that includes software, servers, networking and storage,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison.
“The combination of Oracle’s world-class software, and the latest hardware innovations represented by the new SPARC T3-based servers, runs Oracle database faster than anything ever before.”
Although Oracle states that its Supercluster demonstrates a 66 percent better price to performance ratio when compared with HP database solutions, no informations regarding pricing or availability regarding the SPARC Supercluster have been made available yet.