Oracle provides Sparc road map, but questions linger

本帖最后由 linton 于 2010-08-11 10:18 编辑

By James Niccolai
August 10, 2010 04:57 PM

IDG News Service - Oracle  has sketched out a five-year road map for Sun's Sparc-based servers, hoping to reassure customers about the future of the platform and reverse a pattern of declining sales.

John Fowler, the former Sun executive who runs Oracle's systems business, laid out the plans in a webcast from Oracle's headquarters Tuesday morning. In an interview beforehand, he also confirmed reports that Oracle has stopped designing x86-based servers with chips from Advanced Micro Devices, and has standardized on Intel processors.

Oracle will release regular updates to Sun's Sparc processors for at least the next five years, and "at least double application performance every other year" on Sparc-based systems, Fowler said. Sparc servers will scale from 32 cores and 4TB of memory today, to 128 cores and 64TB of memory by 2015, he said.

Fowler also announced that Solaris 11, the next big update to Sun's Solaris OS, will ship next year. It will include "major updates across almost every level of the stack," he said, including elements of Sun's Project Crossbow network virtualization technology. Solaris 11 will scale to "tens of terabytes of memory and thousands of processor threads," he said.

It was important for Oracle to articulate a road map for Sun's Sparc-based systems, sales of which have fallen sharply amid the uncertainty around Oracle's acquisition of Sun. Oracle has said from the start it will continue to develop Sparc but it has been light on the details.

Even after Tuesday some questions remained. Oracle has two families of Sparc processors -- the multi-threaded Ultrasparc chips that it develops in-house for its T series servers, and the Sparc64 chips manufactured by Fujitsu and sold in Oracle's high-end M series servers.

Fowler didn't address the two chip lines specifically, referring only to the future of Sparc in general. One analyst said Oracle may eventually use the Ultrasparc chips across both server families, the M series and the T series.

"If I look in my tea leaves, I would say over the next few years all of those systems -- the T series and the M series -- are likely to be built around the Sparc chips Oracle is designing in-house," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight64.

Such a move could reduce Oracle's development costs and give it complete control over the design of its servers. It could produce variations of the Ultrasparc chip, using different interconnects and cache sizes, for example, to make them suitable for the M series servers, Brookwood said.

Asked before the webcast about specific plans for the two chip families, Fowler said he would be talking "generically about Sparc." The two platforms are based on the same underlying architecture and can run the exact same software, so customers "aren't focused on that," he said.

It's also unclear if the Ultrasparc T3 processor, which will double the core count of the existing T2 Plus, will ship by the end of the year, as Oracle had said it would. In the interview, Fowler said he could no longer confirm the release will be this year.

Still, analysts briefed on Oracle's hardware plans said they are more confident now of Sparc's future. Oracle has about the same number of engineers working on Sparc as Sun had before the acquisition, and the company is more focused on results, Brookwood said.

IDC analyst Jean Bozman said Oracle clearly is investing in the future of Sparc and Solaris. She expects a point upgrade to Solaris 10 before the end of the year, and for Oracle to provide a more detailed systems road map at Oracle OpenWorld next month.

In the interview, Fowler confirmed earlier reports that Oracle has stopped developing servers based on AMD chips and is standardizing, for now at least, on Intel processors.

Oracle's x86 strategy is not to offer "every size, shape and color" of server, Fowler said. Oracle will continue to sell two-socket x86 servers that customers can buy on a standalone basis, but its main goal is to engineer systems for larger, "mission-critical" environments such as those that use Oracle's clustering software.

"When you look at our strategy to have a core, enterprise platform and do the integration and value-add on top of that, having every possible variation of processor and system is not as important," Fowler said. It is possible the company will use AMD chips again in the future, he said.

Oracle's big-picture strategy with Sun is unchanged from before. The company will continue to sell standalone servers and storage systems that can run applications from other vendors, but its biggest focus is building systems that tightly integrate Sun and Oracle technologies.

By owning the servers and all layers of the software stack, Oracle argues, it can build systems that perform better and are easier to manage than those of its rivals. The "ultimate expression" of that is the Exadata system for OLTP and data warehousing that Sun and Oracle announced last year, Fowler said.

That product is based on x86 processors and Linux, however, and Oracle still hasn't talked about a similar machine that uses Sparc processors and Solaris.

Oracle is also vying for a bigger piece of the virtualization market. The company has products for virtualizing both x86 and Sparc-based servers, and plans to "rationalize" the management tools so customers can manage both environments from a single tool, Fowler said.

To that end, IDC expects Oracle to merge Sun's Ops Center system management software and Oracle's Enterprise Manager software into a single product by 2012.


    赛迪网

    [导读]在完成收购Sun微系统公司6个月之后，甲骨文官员称，Solaris 11操作系统将在2011年推出。

　　在完成收购Sun微系统公司6个月之后，甲骨文官员称，Solaris 11操作系统将在2011年推出。SPARC的性能在2015年之前每隔一年将提高一倍。

　　8月11日据eweek报道，甲骨文副总裁John Fowler在8月10日举行的网络展示会议上简要介绍甲骨文产品路线图的时候提出了上述要点。这个路线图旨在提高甲骨文作为数据中心解决方案厂商的形象，并且使自己与IBM、惠普和戴尔等竞争对手有所不同。

　　甲骨文要在美国举行80次这种演示会。本周二在旧金山举行的演示会是这些会议的第一次。

　　Fowler在甲骨文用74亿美元收购Sun的时候担任Sun的硬件业务部门的负责人。现在，他在甲骨文继续担任同样的职务。Fowler说，合并后的公司现在能够利用甲骨文的企业软件产品在Sun的硬件上运行，从而提供了这个行业中“无敌”的性能和伸缩性水平。

　　甲骨文一直提供开放的和能够在任何环境中运行的软件和应用程序以及帮助这些软件更好地在一起工作的管理工具。Fowler说，收购Sun只是这个战略的一个基本的扩张。

　　Fowler说，甲骨文已经制定了一个到2015年的SPARC处理器的发展计划，第一阶段芯片已经设计完成，将在未来的18至24个月内推出。

　　Fowler说，甲骨文将把SPARC处理器用于两个服务器产品线，一个是T系列节能服务器，另一个是M系列高端的重要任务服务器。在五年之内，SPARC处理器的处理能力将是目前的40倍。这种处理器将达到128个内核和16,384个线程。目前的SPARC处理器最多支持512个线程。

　　Fowler说，甲骨文还将继续支持配置英特尔芯片的x86机架式和刀片式服务器。我们将继续积极地为x86市场开发刀片式和机架式服务器。

　　2011年将推出的Solaris 11将是这个操作系统自从2004年推出Solaris 10以来的第一次重大升级。Sun曾为Solaris 10发布过许多软件更新。Fowler说，Sun将继续支持它。伸缩性、维护、安全和文件系统是这个新的操作系统中改进的关键点。

这下solaris活了。对于各方都是好消息。