Oracle touts high-performance x86 clusters

Oracle is attempting to extend its leadership in the x86 clustered systems market with the launch of new Sun Fire x86 systems, including rackmount servers, blades and 10GbE cluster fabric.

The firm is trying to build an array of x86 clustered systems across both its hardware and software stacks, and believes that its latest releases will let customers run a mix of Oracle and non-Oracle enterprise workloads across a grouping of systems.

John Fowler, executive vice president for Sun Systems at Oracle, said the systems would deliver enterprise-class performance and scalability while reducing complexity and cost.

“The launch of our Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems underscores our commitment to delivering the best, most differentiated x86 clustered solutions," he added.

“We are the first to deliver high-performing application-to-disk solutions that can be managed and supported as a single system.”

The Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems kit will ship with Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM, and will give enterprises an end-to-end virtualised environment for supporting Oracle's software, as well as other x86 operating systems and virtualisation platforms.

To highlight the technology's performance, Oracle said it had broken a number of world records including one on the SAP Sales and Distribution-Parallel standard application benchmark running the SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application.