$1 Million Oracle SPARC Servers to Be Released

Oracle refreshed its Sun SPARC servers today for the first time in a couple years, with one analyst saying the new boxes are mostly for existing customers.

The SPARC servers are based on the new SPARC T5 and M5 processors, which Oracle unveiled earlier this year. The machines range from the single-socket SPARC T5-1B blade all the way to the SPARC M5-32, which as the name implies has 32 sockets.

Though the RISC- and Itanium-based server market is still a multibillion dollar industry, revenue has declined sharply.Numbers from Gartner at the end of last month indicated that RISC/Itanium revenue dropped almost 32% in the last quarter of 2012 compared to the same quarter in 2011. In addition, Oracle's server revenue market share went from 5.3% in the fourth quarter of 2011 to 4.1% in the fourth quarter of 2012, losing out to other big players such as IBM."Customers already on SPARC boxes will be looking forward to those systems," said Frank Scavo, a managing partner at Strativa and an industry analyst. "I think it's largely a play for Sun's install base."

Oracle hopes the SPARC refresh will help boost its numbers, and said as much in its recent earnings call, adding that they thought many SPARC customers were delaying their server upgrade until the new T5 and M5 servers were available, which is common.
Here are the specs on the servers:

• The T5-1B blade has one 16-core, 3.6 GHz SPARC T5 processor with up to 256 GB of RAM.
• The T5-2 is a 3U rack server with two T5 chips and up to 512 GB of RAM.
• The T5-4 is a 5U rack server with four T5 chips and up to 2 TB of RAM.
• The T5-8 is an 8U rack server with eight T5 chips and up to 4TB of RAM.
• The M5-32 is a full rack with 32 6-core, 3.6 GHz SPARC M5 processors with up to 32 TB of RAM. Oracle said this server will be focused for back-end database and big ERP systems.

Oracle did not provide list prices, but in its benchmark results it appears the T5-8 list price will be about $270,000 and the M5-32 list price will be about $1 million. The T5-8, according to the benchmark results documentation, will be available in September.

Marshall Choy, Oracle director of systems solutions and business planning, said the new SPARC servers will be "very singularly focused on IBM as the main competitor."

"The previously introduced T4-based systems are entry-level (to SPARC)," Choy said. "The T5 are positioned as midrange and M5 is at the high-end."

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Sun Microsystems Trumps Competition with New High-Performance, Energy-Efficient Flash SSD Product Line

Sun Microsystems Trumps Competition with New High-Performance, Energy-Efficient Flash SSD Product Line

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Sun Ahead of Emerging Trend: 2008 Expected to be Tipping Point Year for Solid State Disk (SSD) "Flash" Evolution from Consumer Electronics into Enterprise ITSANTA CLARA, CA Juni 4, 2008 Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it is preparing to introduce new Sun solid state disks (SSD) to the market that will give customers greater application performance, massive scale and value through the integration of the Solaris Operating System (OS), Solaris ZFS and other open source technologies. Sun is already shipping Solaris ZFS software optimized for SSD technologies through the OpenSolaris community and is the first major systems vendor to add an end-to-end Flash-based disk product line to its portfolio, leapfrogging competitors and giving customers 3x better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of traditional spinning disk offerings.

New Flash disks integrated in storage systems and servers will join Sun's list of industry-leading products available for free, no-risk trials under Sun's Try and Buy program. Because the New Flash arrays so dramatically reduce energy use, they will join Sun's growing portfolio of Eco Innovation products and services. To download OpenSolaris software or to learn more about the community, go to www.sun.com/openstorage or www.econram.com

With the recent explosion of data that needs to be processed efficiently and immediately accessible, companies of all sizes are looking to open source storage solutions that work with general purpose hardware. Flash-based innovation enables these customers to immediately increase application performance and save on energy costs compared to traditional Fibre Channel hard drives. Flash technology will also enable greater system utilization and scalability that will decrease server and storage sprawl in already maxed-out data centers.

"Flash SSD is the most exciting innovation to happen to system and storage design in over a decade. By mid-2009, it will be in the majority of servers and deliver more capacity than DRAM and far greater overall system performance and energy efficiency," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "This technology will completely change how server and storage infrastructure is designed and deployed in enterprise data centers."
2008: Tipping Point for Flash Storage
With the sprawl of under-utilized server and storage systems growing out of control and generating exorbitant power, cooling and space costs, customers are ready for Flash SSD technologies. The Flash SSD market is currently defined by consumer electronics and high volume deployment on cell phones, mp3 players, key chain dongles and other devices has driven down the cost for Flash technology. In the storage industry, 2008 will prove to be a pivotal tipping point for Flash technology, as the performance and reliability along with the price of SSD is expected to be more attractive than Fibre Channel hard drive technology. Enterprise class Fibre Channel hard disk drives have only exhibited a 40 percent year-over-year price decline in the last decade, while the Flash SSD price per gigabyte continues to fall between 50 to 70 percent annually.

Sun's Open Approach to Flash Storage
Sun is first to market with software integration and co-development of enterprise Flash technology with other industry leaders. Sun's Flash SSD technologies are optimized for MySQL database and other leading applications. These solutions leverage open source platforms and communities to uniquely address these issues, increase the performance of data intensive applications and deliver the industry's best value. The integration of Solaris ZFS in Open Storage systems, Sun's industry standard servers and Sun services sets Sun apart in the industry. These solutions are "Flash Ready" today so customers can easily, simply and cost-effectively scale their infrastructure as required and ensure data is securely stored and accessible 24/7.

Flash Storage is Greener
Customers today are running out of space, power and cooling and are looking to solve the growing problem. Forty-one percent of Fortune 500 IT execs claim power/cooling as a major problem. Over 25 percent of an IT budget is used for energy (power and cooling) costs and this number continues to rise. Flash technology SSDs consume around one fifth of the power of both memory DIMMs and disk drives, have no rotating media and consume very little power when not in use, making it "greener" than its alternatives.

Availability
Sun is expected to deliver Flash-based products to market in the 2HCY08

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