Oracle recently made a set of presentations which outlined what their strategy was in terms of hardware, software, markets etc.. Each speaker had a slide show to accompany their talks, and each of the slideshows was quite extensive.
Speaker
Webcast
Presentation
Charles Phillips: Welcome and Oracle + Sun: Transforming the Industry
His slideshow has one slide; a picture of a racing yacht with Oracle and Sun logos on it! This for me sums up his character. Hes got a ton of energy and sees his company more like something that he needs to guide and be successful with, and at the same time looks good whilst doing it!
In this respect, Oracle have made it very clear what they want to do with the portfolio they have acquired from Sun, and this does include investing heavily in SPARC processors. Given the kind of performance we saw with the T1000 on Heanets review, I’m personally looking forward to the day when Oracle manage to further commoditise this cool hardware
So HP have put 1000 cores in a rack ( with some serious cut backs ). Well thats great. Web 2.0 can keep growing nicely. Sun however, can put 336 cores in a rack. Yes, thats less, but its units of execution that count (i.e. threads) ( of course it all depends on your workload, but still, we’ll play the numbers game). So in these 336 cores, Sun pack 2688 threads. Using these t5240 machines, you ‘ll also get 2688GB of RAM. 42 DVD drives, 84 * 10Gb Ethernet interfaces. You also get on-cpu cryptographic acceleration for DES, 3DES, AES, RC4, SHA1, SHA256, MD5, RSA to 2048 key, ECC, CRC32. Nice. Oh, with HP, you get no storage. Not one bit. With the Sun configuration, you’ll get 336 * 146GB drives. Thats 49056GB of storage (49TB). Theres a Sun released white paper which explains more about how the new generation of T2 and T2+ chips work.
Working for Sun may change my views on hardware, but really these figures speak for themselves!
One thing I found out about the Solaris OS is that regardless of system load or runlevel, you could always ping the box. Even when you rm -rf / Ok, so that wasn’t always true, somtimes it was powered off, but its pretty close. Solaris appears to have gained another ability……Despite a “failed” install of build 78 of OpenSolaris which collapsed at 85% completion, the machine still appears to have installed well. It boots, JDS works fine, ZFS is happy, and nothing has crashed (yet). This is another shining example why those guys down in the Sun labs deserve a pay rise!!! Now, if only they could fix a gigabit ethenet bug thats affecting me……
