Oracle VM Server for SPARC

Sun SPARC T3 Servers

Oracle announced their new line of Sun SPARC T3 powered servers at Oracle Openworld 2010. The SPARC T3 processor includes several improvements on T2 and T2+ processors including:

T2 / T2+T3
65 nm manufacturing process40 nm manufacturing process
4MB L2 Cache6MB L2 Cache
8 Cores (8 threads/core)16 Cores (8 threads/core)
8 Crypto Accelerators (1/core)16 Crypto Accelerators (1/core)
DDR2 FB-DIMMsDDR3
1 On Board PCIe x8 v1 Port2 On Board PCIe x8 v2 Ports

It is interesting to note that the T2 processor was only used in single socket systems. The T2+ processor removed the T2's on board 10 GbE ports and other components to make room for the SMP glue. With the T3 processors, the 10 GbE ports have returned and the chip has built in glueless support for 4 way servers.

All in all they have packed more T-Series goodness in a smaller package but I'm not making goo-goo eyes yet.

Sun Oracle Webcast Wrap Up

Last night I watched almost the entire 5 hour live webcast announcing Oracle's strategies regarding the Sun Microsystems acquisition. As a near-evangelist for Sun and Solaris, I'm very happy with the deal finally going through and even happier that most of what Oracle said makes sense to me as a customer.

Sun's Predicament

I've been working with Unix for a fairly long time now- about 13 years.

I'll admit that I started with Linux and thought it was light years ahead of SunOS 4.x running on those old SPARC machines- I mean who had heard of SPARC processors? I remember my boss trying to explain to me that even an older SPARC processor was more powerful than a newer Intel Pentium processor. I didn't really believe him. In time, I convinced them to get rid of most of their SPARC/Solaris in favor of the hip, free, and cheap Intel/Linux combination.

Now I see that I couldn't have been more wrong. I realize that SunOS 4.x probably still has features which I don't know how to use properly. When I look at Solaris 10, ZFS, Zones, LDOMS, DTrace, etc. I not really sure you could pay me to work with Linux (that would be soo depressing). That isn't even mentioning the SPARC hardware it runs on- Can any Intel server compare to a T5140???