Sun and Oracle Release Fastest OLTP and Data Warehouse Appliance

On Tuesday, Sun and Oracle announced the Oracle Exadata V2 OLTP and Data Warehouse appliance. This appliance replaces the previous generation Exadata appliance built on HP equipment and uses all Sun hardware. This includes Sun Galaxy x64 servers (X4170 & X4275), Sun FlashFire Storage, and Sun's own fully non-blocking Infiniband switches integrated into Sun cabinets for easy expansion. The end result is an appliance able to blow away the competition completely and utterly on OLTP and Data Warehouse workloads. In the webcast link above, Ellison and Fowler make great jabs at IBM and demonstrate significant savings over over 5 times. Each fully configured cabinet can perform over a million IOPS, ridiculously insane as Fowler said. Without a doubt, this is a strong endorsement of Sun technology and demonstrates how Sun and Oracle will work together going forward. Also think the new Sun/Oracle logo looks great! To think we'll see more in next month when Oracle demonstrates how Sun T5440's and Oracle 11g can beat the pants off of IBM and Power6!

SPARC Roadmap Leaked

Well the Register has an interesting article that leaks a slide of the SPARC processor roadmap. While most of the info there is not new to those who are customers or pay attention to conferences, it's still a great read and shows how Sun/Oracle has realigned the roadmap without the UltraSPARC-RK "Rock" processor in the mix. Some interesting points from the slide are:

• Transition from 40->28nm process thanks to TSMC.
• Only minor speed-ups for SPARC64 Jupiter CPU's until 2012.
• APL2 will arrive in 2012. Would assume this would be centered around the SPARC64-VIII "Venus" processors.
• Rainbow Falls @ 1.67Ghz, 16 cores with 8 threads each, 1-4 socket servers.
• Yosemite Falls @ 2.5Ghz, 8 cores with 8 thread each, 1-4 socket servers.
• Yellowstone Falls @ 3Ghzs, 4 cores with 8 threads, 4-192 socket servers!
• Cascade Falls @ 3Ghzs, 16 cores with 8 threads, 1-8 socket servers.

As you can see, the SPARC64 roadmap is much slower, even though it is using the Venus processor in the Project Keisoku super-computer project for the Japanese government. With APL2 not arriving until 2012, it may not be the primary future focus for Sun/Oracle.

Which brings us to the follow on processors for Rainbow Falls. Looks like we'll see fewer cores with Yosemite Falls and Yellowstone Falls. However, look at Yellowstone Falls, it can scale up to 192 sockets!! This may become the replacement for what ROCK should have been. I doubt that the lessons learned from ROCK will be lost and if anything enhance the CMT line-up. Looks like Sun/Oracle will be able to fill up the volume, mid-range, and perhaps even high-end servers with CMT processors. I would have to assume that single-threaded performance will finally be addressed. And with clock speeds going into the 3Ghz range, we should see some significant performance increases.

Considering the performance benchmarks for Oracle products on CMT, it makes sense that Oracle would place the recently promised increase in SPARC development on CMT. This would give the biggest return on investment as the vast majority of Oracle products today are already multi-threaded and scalable.

Oracles Reveals Intentions for Solaris and SPARC, Watch out IBM!

Finally! We are starting to see more coming out of Oracle about their intentions for Solaris and SPARC. This re-enforces what Larry Ellison had stated earlier in the year that Oracle would increase the investment in Solaris and SPARC. This is great news to Sun customers and of course bad news for IBM and HP who were hoping to make further gains on spreading FUD. Now we just have to wait for the outcome of the EU investigation into the merger, which is centered around MySQL. Once that is sorted out, I fully expect to see a major shake-down at Sun and a huge increase in staffing and resourcing on key products, which is badly needed. This should help bring more hope to customers and users alike. Solaris and SPARC will continue on!

Flash Storage?

It would appear that Sun will be announcing a single rack unit flash storage array with SAS interfaces, battery backup, and 80 flash modules. Without a doubt this is a huge leap forward, even for a JBOD. The performance and capacity could be used for all sorts of applications from accelerating databases, messaging, HPC applications, image or audio processing, to mundane things like VTL caching. This will be Sun's first step into selling products that could very well change the storage landscape. These same flash modules could be leveraged on larger arrays or even internal storage for servers. I have no doubt that Oracle will leverage this kind of technology with integrated high-performance database appliances.