Oracle has rolled out new additions to the SPARC platform. Built on the new SPARC S7 microprocessor, the latest additions to the SPARC platform include new cloud services, engineered systems, and servers.
The announcement was made in connection with Oracle OpenWorld Latin America 2016 in Brazil.
With the new SPARC S7 products and services, Oracle is offering a full spectrum of SPARC offerings that go from public cloud offerings all the way to on-premise server offerings, and opening up new opportunities to customers in their path to cloud computing, said Marshall Choy, vice president of product management at Oracle.
The new offerings will also meet the needs of a part of the market that has not been addressed by Oracle SPARC portfolio from a combined enterprise functionality standpoint and cost point perspective, said Choy. These include net-new customers because Oracle can now match the economic cost points of x86 servers and exceed the enterprise capabilities; and also an installed base that is running M7 systems for midrange and high-end back office workloads, giving them the opportunity to further expand the SPARC footprint beyond the back office applications to do scale-out.
SPARC S7 processor-based cloud services and systems
According to Oracle, the new SPARC S7 processor-based cloud services and systems deliver “commodity x86 economics and enterprise-class functionalities” for security and analytics with “software in silicon.” They include new Oracle Cloud Compute platform services, the Oracle MiniCluster S7-2 Engineered System, and Oracle SPARC S7 servers. The new products are designed to integrate with existing infrastructure and include integrated virtualization and management for cloud.
The new additions to the SPARC platform are built on the 4.27 GHz, 8-core/64-thread SPARC S7 microprocessor with software in silicon features such as Silicon Secured Memory and Data Analytics Accelerators, which deliver high per-core efficiency and enable organizations to run applications of all sizes on the SPARC platform.
Oracle says all existing commercial and custom applications will run on the new SPARC enterprise cloud services and solutions unchanged with improvements in security, efficiency, and simplicity.
Key Features
- Security - Addressing security concerns, the latest additions to the SPARC platform are designed for security and compliance and utilize Silicon Secured Memory capabilities to address malware attacks and programming errors. Wide-key encryption ciphers and hashes enable a fully encrypted cloud with less than 2% performance overhead. In addition, Oracle says, security is further enhanced through verified boot, immutable content that prevents unauthorized changes, enforced secured updates and a trusted and secure hardware and software supply chain that does not rely on intermediaries.
- Efficiency - Taking advantage of the open APIs in the processor and integrated Data Analytics Accelerators, which deliver up to 10x greater analytics performance spanning enterprise, big data and cloud applications, the latest additions to the SPARC platform reduce latency and cost for greater efficiency. When compared to the x86 servers, the fully integrated S7-2 and S7-2L servers delivers up to 100% better per core efficiency, 1.7x better per core Java performance efficiency, 1.6x per core database OLTP performance efficiency, and 2-3x more bandwidth for high-traffic analysis and cloud apps.
- Simplicity - For greater simplicity, Oracle says the MiniCluster S7-2 Engineered System seeks to address the top four most challenging aspects of enterprise computing - security and compliance; high availability; patching and administration; and performance tuning. By eliminating the need for a standard platform or OS and reducing security and database administration time and effort, the new engineered system abstracts away the complexity of running enterprise-class features, and enables organizations to secure systems by default, automate compliance monitoring and auditing, make HA easier to set up, improve patching, and enhance database and application performance with automatic performance tuning.
New SPARC S7 Products
The new Oracle SPARC Cloud service that is now part of the SPARC platform is a dedicated compute service to provide organizations with a compute platform in the cloud. The new service extends the complete suite of cloud services that Oracle provides to help organizations rapidly build and deploy rich applications—or extend Oracle Cloud Applications—on an enterprise-grade cloud platform.
Extending the security systems to mid-size computing, there is the Oracle MiniCluster S7-2. Through full application and database compatibility with SuperCluster M7, Oracle MiniCluster enables organizations to reduce hardware and software costs at a fraction of the cost of commodity solutions. The new Oracle Engineered System is designed to support multi-tenant application and/or database consolidation, remote office/branch office computing demands and test/development environments.
New additions to the SPARC server product line that extend the M7/T7 portfolio to address scale-out and cloud workloads at attractive new low price points include new two-socket SPARC S7 servers. They are available in different configuration options that are optimized for either compute or storage and IO density and include Software in Silicon offload features for malware attack prevention, no compromise encryption and data analytics acceleration.
Smoothing the Move to the Cloud
While the business benefits of the public cloud are becoming increasingly clear, Oracle says that many organizations have yet to move enterprise workloads to the cloud due to concerns about performance, security, and management. To help address those challenges, the new SPARC platform is designed from the ground up to improve cloud computing delivery economically for critical business applications and scale-out application environments.
Citing IDC data that, over the next several years, investment in cloud infrastructure - whether public or private - will continue to grow, Choy said that by 2020 many CIOs expect to be spending about half of their annual IT budget on cloud or cloud-related technologies. By providing an entire portfolio of public cloud services, engineered systems, and standalone server products all based on the SPARC platform, Choy said, Oracle is helping organizations advance their cloud initiatives, whether hybrid, or completely in the cloud.
For more information, go to www.oracle.com.