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Oracle Releases SPARC T5 Servers; Too Late?
First time accepted submitter bobthesungeek76036 writes "On March 26th, Larry Ellison and always with fashionable haircut John Fowler announced the new line of SPARC servers from Oracle. Touted as the fastest microprocessor in the world, they put up some impressive SPEC numbers against much more expensive (and older) IBM hardware. Is the industry still interested in SPARC or is it too late for Larry to regain the server market that Sun Microsystems had many moons ago?"
El Reg has a pretty good overview of the new hardware; the T5 certainly looks interesting for highly threaded work loads (there's some massive SMT going on with 16 threads per core), but with Intel dominating for single-threaded performance and ARM-based servers becoming available squeezing them for massive multi-threading, is there really any hope in Oracle's efforts to stay in the hardware game?
While the T5 may be insignificant to a huge swath of the server market, there are many sectors (financial, energy, Federal, geo, etc.) that make significant use of SPARC platforms. The T5 is a huge advance to these markets. Oracle's not really struggling to stay in the hardware game is the Reg indicates. They produce much of their x86 gear because they use it in the Exa stuff. Their SPARCs are their bread and butter hardware in terms of raw server power. They will sell them as fast as they can produce them. Their recently announced move of manufacturing facilities from Mexico to Oregon is indicative of demand. They build their Exa's in Oregon. They worked a deal with the Oregon state Gov (tax incentives) to move their server manufacturing there in order to compress the logistics lag in getting the servers for the Exa to the kitting facility. Anyway, just my two cents.
Oracle is going to need to come up with a new game to make waves with the new processor. Simply improving a processor isn't going to change the fact that what people want are low cost processors without vendor lock in.
Sun made a name for itself with interesting hardware, but that was before processing power was a commodity. There are definitely organizations that still run SPARC, and some others who need top of the line performance that will at least give it a shot, but everyone who has a brain and a little industry experience knows that you can't just "try out" the new SPARC with Oracle in charge. If you walk any distance down that road, you start paying premium prices for every little feature you want going forward.
I used to work in exclusively Sun shops, and I've dealt with Oracle for years. There's little that the hardware and their database can do that can't be replicated by x64 and something like Postgres with some thought behind your architecture. For certain, the features they do have are not cost effective against the hundreds of thousands of dollars you pay for Oracle DB licensing, and the premium you pay for SPARC hardware and support.
I learned on Linux and Solaris (x86/SPARC) when I was 15, and I'm now 32 still using both (do the math).
A saying was told me to growing up, "Use the Proper Tool for the Job" which varies person to person, BUT for me SPARC and Solaris is the right tool. I see the OpenSource community as a great community. My WHOLE stack runs on OpenSource software. I beta-test/develop MUCH of my stuff on either Linux or OSX.
But when it comes to the production OS, I'm not some blanketed Linux bigot. I'm an *NIX Admin and an Architect at heart.
Professionally I'm a CTO (I do everything from programming php / data-center / network / DBA / UNIX / security / etc.) for an internet-based start-up that runs Solaris 10 and used SPARC CoolThread hardware in production. Baffled why? For a few reasons:
When I did a cost analysis of my time & the company's money vs Intel offerings and SPARC I eventually came away with these main points.
1.) SPARC hardware is still WAY superior with remote management than any x86 POS I've ever managed. The ALOM on a SPARC and a serial cable from my Mac works EVERY time. When I worked in past shops managing thousands of Linux Dells and HP's we had nothing but issues with ILOs from the hardware and OS side. Just pure donkey shit.
When you're a start-up buying used hardware it is a great way to cut cost where investors/owners LOVE. Frankly SPARC hardware in my experience can keep on chugging where those HPs and Dells are falling apart right and left. I don't have time to be fucking with hardware when I'm running the show of a million hats.
2.) LONG-term stability with Solaris 10 and maybe Solaris 11 (still evaluating) is a necessity to me. I work for a crazy ass mad-scientist type who does EVERYTHING custom. He's worse than the scientists that I worked with back at JPL-NASA. He has software that's been running for a decade, and the software/application I write with him now he wants to work years down the road as well. That means, I don't need to worry about a yum or apt get update that blows away some part that is critical to ONLY us and I gotta figure WTF happened. The OS is a critical back-bone element where I've seen "Linux dependency hell" fuck me so many times and cost me so many hours, that I PREFER building my own Solaris 10 packages and Solaris 11 (still in testing for me) packages (Yes, I'm a REAL UNIX admin no these lazy wanders) without worries that the OS will be compromised by something lame. In the long-run I have more freedom to enjoy time with my doggies.
When you work for a company that builds custom crap that. Everything it talks to regarding the OS needs to work without question. I have always have had that with Solaris SPARC and with Support till 2018 or extended 2021 by then I should be retired from the gig! But I KNOW nothing funky will happen with the OS while I'm working here. For each new x86 hardware update for Linux, it's a whole new 'testing' to make sure it doesn't blow up the OS on the next reboot. Never had that with SPARC of maintained properly.
With that long-term support and marriage to the hardware I know the relationship is TIGHT, that can be VERY useful when you're concerned with down the road support or integration. Dell or HP does a hardware update and the RedHat or Debian kernel or images haven't been added, then you gotta do a post image. FUCK THAT NIGHTMARE! SPARC WORKS end of story.
3.) Threads! NOTHING compares to SPARC when it comes to multiple threads and what not. My T2000's running 32 cores make damn good web-servers. They also save space in the rack as well!
4.) Virtualization is WAY superior than KVM or VMWare. I've used many of the OpenSource VM solutions and frankly non compare to the control that I can do with either LDOMs or Solaris Containers/zones.
5.) ZFS yeah, Linux we hear your promises of a bad-ass filesystem, I'm still waiting.
So, is Oracle and SPARC dead? Popularity may go down, that's normal, but it's not "dead" to anyone who has a reason/purpose to use the OS/hardware offered.
The world isn't one big LAMP stack.
Again, I'm not *against* Linux, I use it for development and personal shit all day. However, I'm not a blind follower either.