Oracle Made Huge Server Announcement At OpenWorld

Five years ago, when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, Larry Ellison talked a lot about how owning the entire systems stack would allow him to do unique things with the servers from Oracle. After five years of hearing the hype and the talk, Ellison looks like he may have finally delivered. However, the big question still remains whether or not consumers will actually buy what he's selling.

Oracle has announced a brand new line of servers at OpenWorld recently that are based on a new Sparc processor known as the M7. This upgrade has the typical improvements that you would expect in a new chip, including more cores, bigger caches, and higher bandwidth though the most interesting thing is software functions that Oracle has embedded into the silicon that improves the performance and security of applications. These include a memory-protection technology that is capable of providing a new level of security for in-memory databases along with an acceleration engine that allows data to be decompressed in near-real time for analytics. As a result, you get a wider use of compressed data.

According to Principal Analyst at Insight64 Nathan Brookwood, "Both of those are very interesting, because they're features I don't think a company that makes just chips -- that didn't have the software guys working with them -- would have invented." Brookwood has asked Oracle what new features it was able to include on each new processor the company has released as a result of owning both companies." Invariably they would say, well, you know, it takes time to do that, we don't really have anything yet," Brookwood added. "But with the M7, they do."

This is also the first new Sparc processor core designed entirely in-house by Oracle. It takes four to six years to design a new microprocessor, which has been the time frame that Oracle has owned Sun. "This is the first project that has Larry's fingerprints all over it," added Marshall Choy, Oracle Senior Director for Optimized Solutions. The M7 is currently on sale now and is in new models of Oracle's T-Series and M-Series servers along with an upgrade to the Oracle Supercluster, which is a pre-configured system for running the Oracle database.

The memory-protection technology, which is also known as "silicon-secured memory", prevents malicious programs from accessing parts of main memory that they're not used to, thus disposing of a common attack method for hackers. Whenever a new application needs new memory, the M7 creates a unique "color bit" which ensures the application can access only the portion of memory assigned to it. When the application process ends, the color bit expires and a new one is created for the next allocation of memory. "That's how we can prevent a piece of malware from accessing a memory segment it's not authorized to, because it will do that color code checking and abort the program if it doesn't match," Choy added.

This is particularly significant due to the fact that customers are storing large amounts of data in memory for analytics, where it is more susceptible to attacks. The secured memory technology will be available to any application that runs on the M7 systems, Choy said, and not just ones from Oracle. In addition to that, it is also capable of uncovering low-level bugs in software because it exposes any problems with memory allocation. For decompression, the accelerator in the chip will run at the full speed of Oracle's in-memory database. This means that customers will be able to use compressed data for in-memory computing without the performance overhead that they would normally have to deal with.

Oracle is offering the M7 chip in the T-Series servers, which are typically used for scale-out configurations, and in the M-Series servers, which scale up to form big SMP boxes. This is also the first time the company will use the same processor across both product lines and, according to Choy, "We literally have one chip. We have exactly on part number for the M7."

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Oracle's New SPARC Supercluster

When the Sun SPARC microprocessor first came out, many people thought that it would be a dead end. Well, Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, is on a mission to prove all of those naysayers wrong.

Oracle announced a plethora of new servers powered by SPARC as well as an outline for future development of SPARC. Among the new servers there is an SPARC based Exalogic Elastic Cloud and the newly unveiled SPARC Supercluster. It seems that the new SPARC servers are being optimized for the upcoming Solaris 11 Unix os as Sun's hardware and software portfolios undergo an update from Oracle.

According to Ellison, "For all our competitors that have been enjoying their Sun down and Sun set programs, this is the end of that. The Sunrise program is all about SPARC and Solaris, those two foundation technologies are going to lead the industry into the next generation of engineered systems."

One of the new SPARC systems announced by Oracle is the Exalogic Elastic Cloud server which is powered by SPARC. Back in September, Oracle debuted an x86 based Exalogic server at OpenWorld. The Exalogic server is a middleware enhanced cloud-in-a-box solution that is specifically designed for Java applications. On the flipside, the SPARC version is powered by a 16 core T3-1B SPARC processor.


Oracle is also making a general purpose computing platform with the new SPARC Supercluster while Exalogic is focused on Java middleware performance. "The Supercluster is a general purpose server that will run your middleware, your customer apps and your database extremely well," Ellison said. "It runs your database faster than anyone has run any database before."

Aside from talking about the new SPARC T3 processors in the Exalogic and Supercluster platforms, Ellison also talked about the benefits of InfiniBand, which is used in both systems in order to approve overall performance. InfiniBand is typically seen in high performance computing systems and offers lower latency than your traditional Ethernet configurations.

According to Ellison, "We think InfiniBand is dramatically better for linking servers to other servers and servers to storage than Ethernet. We certainly have Ethernet connectivity to these boxes, but when these servers are talking amongst themselves and talking to storage, they're going through a high performance, reliable and guaranteed delivery network called InfiniBand."

Oracle is continuing to move ahead on SPARC performance beyond the current generation of T3 processors. According to Ellison, "The T4 is alive in the lab delivering a lot better single-threaded performance than the T3. In T3 we focused on adding more cores, and in the T4 we're trying to make our single thread performance better and it looks very good right now."

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Server OS Landscapes Going with the Flow

The world of UNIX and Linux server operating systems right now is anything but boring. However, that may not be the best thing, especially for enterprises that want a background of stability and certainty when they choose a server OS to power their business.

If you use Sun UNIX, then you know all about this. The OpenSolaris project just recently disintegrated into nothing after a long run of uncertainty and was replaced by something probably based on the Illumos project like the OpenIndiana spork. Users of Solaris weren't greeted with such a rude awakening though. Their enterprise OS hasn't actually gone away. They have, however, come to terms with the fact that UNIX is now a product of Oracle which means it is being developed along a very, very different style then it was under Sun.

The Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is under Novell and is also one of the two leading open source server distributions. The server itself runs just fine but, being owned by Novell, which is known for being a little chaotic, has cast a shadow over the product.

On a lighter side, if you are a Red Hat shop, you can rest assured that you are running the number one open source server OS from a dependable and stable company. In fact, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is respected so highly that Oracle uses it as a basis for its own Linux offering.

But how long will this last? Oracle has decided to drop Red Hat compatibility in its Oracle Linux Product after announcing the Oracle Unbreakable Kernel for Oracle Linux at Oracle OpenWorld last week. According to Oracle, it is a "fast, modern, reliable kernel that is optimized for Oracle software and hardware." Oracle also promises that the new kernel will offer a 75% performance gain demonstrated in OLTP performance tests over a Red Hat compatible kernel, a 200% speedup of Infiniband messaging and 137% faster solid state disk access.

It is rumored that VMware may buy Novell's Linux business, and if that does happen, then Red Hat is going to be a minnow among sharks in the server OS market going forward. To put it into perspective, Solaris is a part of a $140 billion Oracle Corporation while SLES would be a part of a $36 billion VMware. As for Windows, AIX and HP-UX, they are each owned by corporations worth some $220 billion (Microsoft), $166 billion (IBM) and $90 billion (HP) respectively. Red Hat is definitely the odd one out with only $7 billion.

That leaves IBM, HP and Microsoft. All these companies are fairly predictable and boring, but they are also huge. However, with all that is going on in the enterprise operating systems market at the moment, big, boring and predictable may be the perfect thing for many potential customers.

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