ICT

SPARC plays important role in IT- led growth

The Scalable Processor Architecture or SPARC that the team developed was based on RISC and made the market debut 25 years ago. The feat of this team was remarkable because it went beyond developing just the microprocessor. To get the highest performance from their chip, it created its own operating system (OS), then called Solaris. The SPARC and Solaris combination redefined the graphics workstation and enterprise computing performance with better scalability and availability than what the competition had to offer. But it was the complete integration of software and hardware that would become so important, first to Sun, and later to Oracle after it acquired Sun in 2010.

Sun-4 heralded the beginning of a new age of high-performance IT infrastructure. SPARC successfully challenged the dominance of mainframes by delivering performance that was orders of magnitude ahead of the competing platforms. In no time, SPARC became a significant business for Sun. The journey of 25 years since that time has been decorated with many milestones and world records ? many of which are held to date.

Throughout its history, SPARC processor-based systems have played an important role in delivering IT-led growth of a diverse set of industries; including financial services, healthcare, telecommunications and government.

The SPARC platform has been for years the industry standard for running mission-critical applications. In fact, the impact of SPARC on the IT industry was captured succinctly in a memorable advertising tag line ? if it has to run, it has to be on SPARC.

The combination of SPARC with Oracle Solaris was also a bold step in complete integration of software and hardware that is the distinguishing feature of Oracle?s strategy today. Full-stack integration is an essential part of any SPARC system, and these are known to be the industry’s most reliable, scalable, and secure systems for mission-critical enterprise applications and cloud.

Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, and since that time Oracle’s hardware and software engineers have worked side-by-side to build fully integrated systems and optimised solutions.

After the acquisition, Oracle has been committed to deliver new SPARC processors and server hardware every 12 to 18 months. Oracle is now driving the innovation with a USD5 billion a year spend on research and development and has delivered more than what was promised on the SPARC and Oracle Solaris roadmap.

The time to major SPARC delivery milestones has gotten shorter, and with the release of the SPARC T4 processor, Oracle is delivering better-than-promised performance.

In addition to performance and adoption milestones, the SPARC platform has a history of introducing improvements in other areas important to enterprises, including data security.

Today, the SPARC T4 processor includes unique integrated on-chip cryptographic support that provides wire-speed encryption capabilities for secure data center operation.

SPARC also is the only platform available today that includes on-chip encryption and the Oracle Solaris security framework. For the customers, it means tremendous business value through improved system utilization and built-in comprehensive, zero-cost virtualization capabilities.

A new roadmap for SPARC was announced in 2010 and over a five-year period, it calls for improvement of four times the cores, 32 times the threads, 16 times the memory capacity, 40 times the database transactions, and 10 times the Java operations per second.

Future Oracle Solaris updates in 2013, 2014, and 2015 will track with SPARC innovation and will provide higher availability, increased memory, improved virtualization, enhanced system management, greater I/O capacity, and improved scalability.

The roadmap also projects significant improvements every two years, and also illustrates an assurance to maintain SPARC/Oracle Solaris binary compatibility with the hundreds of thousands of deployments over more than two decades.

Going forward, the SPARC roadmap includes new T and M-Series servers that are expected to deliver significant throughput advancements over the current-generation models.