Oracle Announces New HPC Cluster Servers

…but HPC is not what you think it is.  Oracle today announced a series of new additions to its Sun x86 blade servers with integrated network fabrics.  True to Larry Ellison’s words, the new machines are focused on the high-end server market.  However, given the technical aspects highlighted in the release, it seems the target market is really high performance enterprise computing.

Oracle logoWe claim we can manage a full blade ecosystem without requiring any network skills, because network virtualization is done in the silicon and through Oracle middleware technology,” Dimitris Dovas, director of product management for Sun hardware at Oracle, said on a videoconference announcing the new hardware.

According to the release info, the new Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems are designed for customers running a mix of Oracle and non-Oracle enterprise workloads.  “They are optimized for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM, which supports Red Hat and Suse Linux along with the KVM hypervisor.”

From the hardware perspective, the new blades contain either Intel 5600 or 7500 series processors.  The latter of which is targeted at the market currently occupied by the Sun UltraSparc-based platforms.  Other improvements include lights-out firmware and BIOS management that dials home to Oracle for updates and integrated 10GbE fabrics.

For more info on the new enterprise server digs from Oracle, check out the info here.

Comments

  1. Oracle’s Marc Hamilton does a good job of putting this announcement in context on his blog. This is really all about the company’s new “system” approach to clustered systems: http://blogs.sun.com/marchamilton/entry/highlights_of_oracle_s_next