Database giant Oracle has upgraded its high end server systems, putting pressure on rivals such as IBM.
It has upgraded the SPARC microprocessor, devised originally by Sun Microsystems, and aimed squarely at running enterprise applications, including Oracle database systems.
IBM uses the proprietary Power microprocessor but Oracle is claiming the T5 servers will have a considerable lead over comparable systems from Big Blue. IBM is likely to hotly dispute such a claim.
But such high end servers are not for mid range systems – a market dominated by Intel’s Xeon X86 microprocessors. Even though Oracle also produces X86 servers, it hasn’t achieved a great deal of traction against similar systems produced by HP and others. IBM still produces X86 servers too.
The Oracle SPARC T5 and M5 servers are intended for mission critical applications. The T5, Oracle claims, is the world’s fastest CPU and includes wire speed encryption and over 2.3 times performance over the previous SPARC microprocessor.
A T5-8 Oracle server supports 128 DDR3-1066 DIMM slots – that’s 16 a processor, and can provide 4TB of memory. It can also take up to eight 2.5-inch HDDs or SSDs.
