Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is a Linux kernel that is optimized for Oracle software and hardware. Announced during Oracle OpenWorld 2010, the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is part of Oracle Linux, which was previously named Oracle Enterprise Linux.

The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is derived from the stable 2.6.32 mainline Linux kernel, and it will continue to track mainline. Oracle outlined some of the related benefits customers can realize with this newly available technology:

• 75 percent performance gain demonstrated in OLTP performance tests over a Red Hat Compatible Kernel; 200 percent speedup of Infiniband messaging; 137 percent faster solid state disk access.

• Provides optimizations for large NUMA servers; improved power management and energy efficiency; fine grained CPU and memory resource control.

• Support of the Data Integrity Extensions and T10 Protection Information Model, to stop corrupt data from being written to storage; hardware fault management enables improved application uptime; low overhead performance counters for tracing.

“With the combination of Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, customers gain fast access to optimizations, new enhancements, and bug fixes,” said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle. “This new offering is a result of Oracle Linux kernel development efforts, on top of the current mainline kernel.”

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Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is an integrated hardware and software system engineered, tested, and tuned by Oracle to run Java and non-Java applications. It offers a complete cloud application infrastructure, combining 64-bit x86 processors, an InfiniBand-based I/O fabric, and solid-state storage with Oracle WebLogic Server, other enterprise Java Oracle middleware products, and a choice of Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux operating system software.

The Exalogic Elastic Cloud is a system containing 30 servers, each loaded with two six-core processors for a total of 360 processor cores. They are interconnected with each other and storage via Infiniband connections.

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is engineered for large-scale, mission-critical deployments. It can support thousands of applications with differing security, reliability, and performance requirements, announced Oracle Chief Executive Officer, Larry Ellison during Oracle OpenWorld 2010, who noted that additional Exalogic machines could be strung together for even more power as required.

“Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is a complete system of servers, network, storage, VM, operating system and middleware, all engineered to work together,” said Ellison. “This delivers stunning results, including the fastest Java performance, elastic capacity on demand and a completely fault tolerant system.”

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Only recently released by Oracle, its Exadata Database Machine is now available in three configurations, the most impressive of which is the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-8, billed by Oracle as the world’s most secure database machine. The Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-8 delivers the ability to query fully encrypted databases with near-zero overhead at hundreds of gigabytes per second, which is accomplished by moving decryption processing from software into the Exadata hardware.

The new configuration extends the Oracle Exadata Database Machine product family with a high-capacity system for large OLTP, data warehousing and consolidated workloads, in that there are now four configurations of the Oracle Exadata Database Machine: the new Oracle Exadata X2-8 full-rack and the Oracle Exadata X2-2 quarter-rack, half-rack and full-rack systems.

According to the Oracle press release, both the Oracle Exadata X2-2 and Oracle Exadata X2-8 full-rack machines can scale to multi-rack configurations for the most demanding database applications.

Among the features of the new Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-8, a complete grid, or private cloud, are:

• Two 8-socket database servers with a total of 128 Intel CPU cores and 2 terabytes of memory;

• 14 Exadata Storage Servers with 168 Intel CPU cores and up to 336 terabytes of raw storage capacity;

• Over 5 terabytes of Exadata Smart Flash Cache to cache frequently accessed ‘hot’ data for extremely fast transaction response times and high throughput;

• Multiple compression tiers to manage more data and reduce I/O requirements of OLTP and data warehousing data;

• 40 Gigabit InfiniBand internal connectivity;

The Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-8, which can run Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Exadata Storage Software provides users with the software, servers, storage and networking for all their database requirements.

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Newly released by Oracle, the ZFS Storage Appliance product line features best-in-class management software and an innovative hybrid storage pool architecture that has been integrated with Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux and Oracle VM, to provide optimal business system performance. Oracle’s product announcement claims that the products deliver the leading throughput, flexibility and ease of use demanded by organizations using storage for cloud computing, virtualization, storage consolidation and data protection.

According to the Oracle release announcement, its line of powerful storage appliances sets a new benchmark in Unified Storage, with 50 percent more performance, two times more storage capacity, nearly three times more processing power, and storage analytics utility with DTrace Analytics.

The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line provides three new tightly integrated data protection solutions for Oracle Applications:

• Oracle RMAN backup optimizes backup with Sun ZFS Storage Appliances

• Oracle Database Cloning increases database performance by integrating Sun ZFS Storage Appliances with Oracle Data Guard

• Oracle Fusion Middleware simplifies disaster recovery with ZFS Storage Appliances.

These offerings extend Oracle’s list of over 70 qualified software solutions with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line.

Oracle’s press release reports that the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line combines an innovative Flash Hybrid Storage Pool architecture for file and block workloads with powerful and intuitive DTrace Analytics for storage and web-based management, enabling organizations to deploy new applications faster and lower administrative costs by up to 50 percent.

In addition, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance product line delivers leadership data protection, storage efficiency costs and higher performance and scalability. For example,the release points out, the Sun ZFS Storage 7720 Storage Appliance provides 1.6 times better storage density than other unified storage solutions.

This high-density storage capability is available across the entire product line from entry-level configurations starting at 12 TB to high-end systems that support more than 1 PB of storage capacity. All systems feature high-density disks and flash acceleration.

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Oracle announced the industry’s first 16-core server processor and new SPARC T3 systems.

Oracle Sun SPARC Enterprise T-Series Systems now have four new servers on their roster. The Sun SPARC Enterprise T-Series Rackmount Systems have added the SPARC T3-1, T3-2, and T3-4 Servers, while the Sun SPARC Enterprise Blade Server Modules’ newest addition is the SPARC T3-1B Server. These systems range from a single socket 16-core blade to a 4-socket, 64-core server with 512 threads in a compact five-rack unit.

“These new SPARC T3 systems deliver on our commitment to provide customers with a 2x increase in performance every two years,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Server and Storage Systems, Oracle, “and deliver massive scalability for high compute environments like cloud computing.”

The SPARC T3 systems are the latest addition to Oracle’s portfolio of cloud-ready software and hardware products, which are designed to enable customers to start small and grow into next-generation cloud computing infrastructure, the company said.

These systems deliver advanced chip-level encryption capabilities and built-in virtualization to improve security and performance at lower costs. This makes them ideal for cloud computing infrastructures, the company asserts.

The SPARC T3 systems feature integrated on-chip cryptographic accelerators that deliver wire speed encryption capabilities, providing customers with critical data and services protection. Along with the newly announced Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.0, the SPARC T3 systems can provide advanced virtualization and offer multiple virtual machines ranging from one per core to 128 virtual machines on a single server.

According to Oracle, the SPARC T3 systems provide customers with a 2x increase in performance over the previous generation of SPARC T-Series systems, and have achieved nine world-record results on multiple industry standard benchmarks and prominent application workloads. The SPARC T3 systems have achieved nine world-record results, the company reports, including a SPECj Enterprise2010 result.

Some of the SPARC T3 server models are expected to begin shipping in the next 30 days.

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SPARC

According to Fowler, regular release updates can be expected for Sun’s SPARC processors over the next five years, and customers can anticipate double the application performance, at a minimum, every other year on these systems.

In its System Trajectory slide, Oracle projects its SPARC systems to improve 40 times in OLTP transactions per minute (TPM) with a capability to support 120 million database TPM in the next five years. Other projections it plans for 2015 for these systems:

• Cores: 128 for 4x the improvement from today
• Threads: 16,384 for 32x the improvement
• Memory capacity: 64 TB for 16x the improvement
• Logical Domains: 256 for 2x the improvement
• Operating System: Solaris 11
• Java Ops per second: 50,000 for 10x the improvement

An article by TechWorld’s James Niccolai notes Fowler did not address Oracle’s two chip lines specifically - 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. He referred only to the future of SPARC in general. The two platforms are based on the same underlying architecture and can run the exact same software, so customers “aren’t focused on that,” Fowler said.

Fowler did confirm, reported Niccolai, that Oracle has stopped designing x86-based servers with chips from Advanced Micro Devices(AMD) chips and is standardizing on Intel processors for now.

Solaris/OpenSolaris

Solaris 10 updates will continue this year, reported Fowler. From documentation on the Oracle Website, there seems to be an upcoming release set for this September.

Following the updates, Oracle plans on offering an early adopter program for Solaris 11, which will probably make its release in the second half of 2011. Scalability and power are the areas where the biggest improvements are set for this new version of Solaris, although users will see major updates across most every level of the stack, Fowler said. Continuing, Fowler promised Solaris 11 will scale tens of terabytes of memory and thousands of processor threads.

Although he did not discuss OpenSolaris during the actual presentation, Fowler did speak to InternetNews.com as reported by Sean Michael Kerner, and noted that Solaris 11 will contain a substantial amount of OpenSolaris technology along with new technologies from Oracle.

“We’re really getting our grip around building a mission critical operating system that includes technologies from OpenSolaris that we’ve been working on for some time as well as technologies that we’ve more recently developed,” Fowler told InternetNews.com. “Solaris 11 will be a superset of what is in OpenSolaris.”

Admitting that Oracle has been silent regarding open source and OpenSolaris, Fowler explained, “It’s not that we’re not investing in Solaris, we’re just investing to make sure that we have all the major components for the new release.”

Oracle posted solid fourth-quarter fiscal results with an increase in net profits and revenue by 25 percent and 39 percent, respectively, when compared to the same period last year. The rise in profits was attributed to higher revenue from databases and business software as well as hardware sales from the acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Revenues went up from $6.9 billion a year ago to $9.5 billion.

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News Facts

• CommVault has earned top honors in the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com Quality Awards for enterprise-class backup and recovery software. This latest accolade marks the company’s fourth trip to the winner’s circle, with end-users giving CommVault® Simpana® software the highest scores in four of five rating categories, including product features, product reliability, technical support and sales-force competence.
• According to the survey, CommVault continues to dominate enterprise deployments as Simpana software received the best score for every statement in the product features category. In particular, survey respondents gave Simpana software high marks for the completeness of the platform and database backups along with file-system and disk backup functionality.
• CommVault outranked competing backup and recovery solutions from EMC, HP, IBM and Symantec in winning the enterprise-class backup and recovery software category.
• Additionally, when respondents were asked if they would be willing to repurchase Simpana software, more than 83 percent concurred, reinforcing strong customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. According to the survey, one respondent commented, “CommVault is hands-down the best software I’ve ever encountered.”
• The Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com Quality Awards are designed to identify and recognize products that have proven their quality and reliability in actual use. The survey methodology incorporates statistically valid polling to identify the most reliable products on the market, as ranked by 358 respondents who provided 567 backup and recovery software evaluations.

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