Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Intel Corp. and flash disk suppliers were the big winners behind the next-generation of servers of the hardware division of Oracle, formerly Sun Microsystems. The Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems family of rack-mounted servers, blades and a 10Gbit Ethernet clustering fabric use solid-state disk storage as standard and generally use Intel processors.
Oracle said its new Sun systems set 14 performance records across multiple benchmarks and workloads. Intel and archrival Advanced Micro Devices have been battling it out in server processors. Many observers give Intel an edge with its latest Nehalem chips.
"Oracle appears to be doubling down on its use of Xeon in these new servers," said Nathan Brookwood, principal of market watcher Insight64 (Saratoga, Calif.).
"Sun’s first 64-bit x86-based systems relied solely on AMD’s Opteron, but a few years later Sun added Xeon and offered parallel configurations based on AMD and Intel technology," Brookwood noted. "Oracle hasn’t ruled out the use of AMD in future servers, but it looks like the 2010 line will be entirely Intel inside," he said.
Oracle's online documentation of the new systems shows it does offer two computer blades using AMD processors for embedded markets using the Advanced TCA form factor.
In storage, "the thing that stands out in these Oracle announcements is the company’s aggressive use of SSD technology to boost performance," added Brookwood.
"Other suppliers offer SSDs, but Oracle’s ability to assemble a proprietary top-to-bottom stack, including applications, middleware are hardware, opens up opportunities to take advantage of SSDs," he said.
Indeed, Oracle, which completed its acquisition of Sun in January, went to great pains to discuss the level of integration between Sun's hardware and software products and Oracle's own versions of Linux, middleware and applications.
“Oracle’s new x86 blade and rack systems provide a complete solution for running Oracle software, delivering an integrated stack designed to reduce capex and opex costs in the data center,” said Matt Eastwood, group vice president, IDC, speaking in a Sun press release.
The flash disks are more expensive that traditional hard disk drives, "but Oracle claims the performance boost more than offsets the incremental cost," Brookwood said. "The math will probably work for many I/O-intensive tasks, but end-users be well advised to check to see if it works for their specific workloads," he added.
Oracle is playing catch up with Hewlett-Packard which leads the market for server blades, the fastest growth segment in the sector.
By: DocMemory
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