Oracle Unveils SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 General Purpose Engineered System -- Campus Technology

Oracle Unveils SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 General Purpose Engineered System

By Leila Meyer
09/27/11

Oracle has unveiled its new SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, a general purpose engineered solution that combines Oracle SPARC T4-4 servers, Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, ZFS Storage Appliances, InfiniBand I/O fabric, and the Oracle Solaris operating system into a single infrastructure solution designed for running a wide range of enterprise applications with high levels of performance and reliability.

The T4-4 is the first entrant in the SPARC SuperCluster family and is based on Oracle's new T4 servers. Oracle developed the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 as a general purpose, complete application-to-disk platform, with hardware and software that are engineered to work together. Oracle sees the SPARC SuperCluster as an ideal platform for consolidation, collapsing multiple tiers of data center architecture into a single system, with multiple applications talking to a single shared database.

The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 supports both version 10 and 11 of the Oracle Solaris operating system, as well as all current Oracle Solaris applications. Due to Solaris binary compatibility, all applications that are currently certified to run on Solaris will run on the SPARC SuperCluster without any changes. The SPARC SuperCluster can run Oracle, non-Oracle, and customer applications.

"Oracle is changing the dynamics of the datacenter by combining the industry's best technology--the SPARC T4 processor, Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle Exadata storage, and the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud software--into a versatile, secure, general purpose engineered system," said John Fowler, executive vice president, systems, Oracle. "Oracle's SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is an ideal platform for application and server consolidation that demonstrates how engineered systems can deliver huge performance at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions."

Key features of the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 include:

Up to 16 SPARC T4 8-core processors and 4 TB of memory in a single rack;
Support for Oracle Solaris 11 and 10;
Optimization for Oracle Exadata and Exalogic software stacks with unique hardware acceleration;
InfiniBand-attached ZFS storage cluster for high performance and fully redundant disk storage;
InfiniBand I/O fabric for scalability, reliability, and high performance connectivity between all components;
Fully built-in virtualization using Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle Solaris Containers;
Fully integrated and redundant processing, storage, and networking components for high availability; and
Built in hardware encryption to provide enhanced data security and privacy integrated with Oracle Database 11gR2.

Further information about Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 can be found at oracle.com.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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