During a live Webcast held Aug. 10, Oracle Executive Vice President for Server and Storage Systems John Fowler discussed a five-year road map for Sun’s SPARC-based servers and next year’s planned release of Solaris 11.
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.”
