Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 during a presentation at the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters.
The new engineered system exploits the same parallelism and data compression provided by Oracle's other engineered systems, the Exadata and Exalogic, said Ellison.
The fact that it runs the Solaris operating system is "extremely important because we have a huge SPARC Solaris installed base and those companies and customers want to upgrade their system with something completely compatible with where they are coming from," Ellison noted.
"We wanted to give them a very, very smooth upgrade path and that is what the SPARC SuperCluster is - the latest in extreme performance via parallelism, the latest advanced compression, but completely upwardly compatible with all the SPARC Solaris systems that exist out there in the world today," he emphasized.
Described as the world's fastest general-purpose engineered system, the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is based on Oracle's new SPARC T4 servers, which represent "a huge single-generation improvement in our core compute building block for a broad range of enterprise applications," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Oracle.
Providing existing SPARC Solaris customers with a smooth upgrade path, the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is a complete application-to-disk solution well suited for consolidating a broad spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications, offering 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 optimized 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. "We think lots and lots of people are going to upgrade from their current SPARC Solaris systems to the new SPARC Solaris SuperCluster," said Ellison.
According to Oracle, the new engineered system also offers superior performance and economics for Oracle Database 11g, with built-in storage compression and security via storage encryption.
The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 supports 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 virtualization with Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM Server for SPARC with powerful management tools including Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center.
Additional information on Oracle's SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 will be available during Oracle OpenWorld 2011, being held October 2-6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
More information, go here.