Oracle Betting On UltraSparcOracle Betting On UltraSparc

Oracle's entry into the hardware business is unlikely to change the overall alignment of server suppliers, but it will revitalize Sun Microsystem's UltraSparc through at least two more generations.

And it will put the still-young notion of software appliances in a new limelight, knowledgeable observers said after Oracle's Jan. 27 briefing on how it will integrate Sun.

Until now, hardware/software appliance combinations have tended to be used primarily in the business intelligence area and for security/firewalls. Oracle is proposing to make a high-end business out of integrated application stacks built on UltraSparc hardware. The move may or may not be an "industry-transforming event," as Oracle executives frequently claim it will be. But it certainly promises to be an Oracle-transforming event.

Oracle is now in the appliance business, optimizing software and hardware to get them to new peaks of performance and reliability. It's a strategy tuned to the strengths of Sun's hardware. While Sun may have fallen behind in matching Intel in shrinking circuit size or IBM and AMD in clock speed, Sun's servers have always been design to run multiple threads, good for processing many small workloads at the same time or executing a large application with many simultaneously running parts.

Oracle no doubt will be happy to sell plain UltraSparc hardware as well to the many Sun customers who are likely to continue to want it. But at the same time, Oracle executives said something that Sun would never have said: "We're not interested in the commodity, Windows, x86 market. There are other people doing that, like Dell, whatever. Let them do that," said Oracle President Charles Phillips in positioning UltraSparc as a value-added product.

Sun Microsystems grew up in the workstation market and competed ferociously for the low end of the Unix server market, dominating it and pushing IBM and HP toward larger systems and larger customers. It was subsequently hit harder by the growth of Linux, but it was nevertheless part of Sun's DNA to pursue a commodity market. In its most competitive days, it sounded as if it intended to displace Microsoft, not IBM. It had previously out-competed Digital Equipment in workstations and threatened to do the same to larger computer makers in servers.

But that was back in the 1980s and 1990s. The Jan. 27 briefing at Oracle headquarters was about the post-merger world of 2010. "We want to be known for a value-added product line, one that's known for scalability and performance. That's what our engineers are going to focus their time on," said Phillips.

He then called a Sun customer to the stage, Mark Kamlet, provost and senior VP at Carnegie Mellon University, who struck just the right notes: "The technology stack has gotten very, very complicated for us. It's an immense hassle trying to get everything to work We want integrated solutions. We want appliances that we can plug in and they work," he said.

Oracle is now in the process of trying to convince the world that it will keep UltraSparc hardware competitive and add enough value in a trouble-free software stack that customers should consider buying their Oracle software in an appliance package. Phillips expanded later on how Oracle will add value to the hardware by building in system management monitors and diagnostics to such appliance that could be run without risk of outage.

Oracle plans to approach large Sun customers with the proposal that they buy a level of support for the appliance that will let Oracle intervene in their data center, if necessary, to keep it running. "We'll take care of the entire stack. We'll be a single point of accountability. People want that."

One way it will be able to do so is if it places collectors of configuration and diagnostic information as a system is activated, and those collectors report in to an Oracle technical support center. "We want to know what people are running every day" to supply the highest possible level of support, Phillips noted.

Oracle will collect operational information from across its extensive customer base on configurations and analyze it to deliver more "pro-active support." Such support would anticipate problems before they became life-threatening to the system, seek out their resolution from an Oracle knowledgebase and "correct them automatically," if the customer had granted permission to Oracle to do so, Phillips said.

In other words, tightly integrated software running on UltraSparc hardware can also be integrated with technical support. Appliances have already become a widely adopted way of conducting business intelligence and data warehouse operations, notes Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett.

He thinks they may play an expanding role with some enterprise applications, such as Oracle's Transportation Management module. The module addresses the many issues of a multi-segment freight shipment, calculating times and rates to move goods by train, ship, and truck. With many variables involved, it would offer greater scalability and performance if executed on an appliance, Gillett suggested.

At the same time, he added, Oracle will have to convince customers that UltraSparc hardware, which came with its $7.4 billion purchase of Sun, is the right foundation for such an appliance. Can it do so? "Oracle just bet a lot of money the answer is yes," Gillett said.

Oracle promised to spend more on UltraSparc than Sun did and it said its $4.3 billion R&D budget for 2010 included an investment in four future chips, one of which, the T3, is due out later this year. A second chip, the M3, is produced by Sun partner Fujitsu as part of its Sparc64 product line. It will be out within the next year-and-a-quarter, said John Fowler, Oracle VP of hardware engineering and a former executive VP of systems at Sun.

The next generation of both chips is on the drawing boards and will continue the products lines into the future. "Four new chips in development. Our UltraSparc road map has never been more robust," said Mike Splain, senior VP of microelectronics at Oracle.

Splain displayed a chart that indicated T3 would move from the T2's eight cores to 16 cores. Rival AMD may have a 12-core Opterons out as soon as T3 but Opteron processes one thread at a time. The Sun/Oracle chip will process eight. A Sun white paper on the T series claims performance can only be measured by application throughput, not clock speeds or shrinking circuit sizes. And an eight-threaded chip offers better throughput than a single-threaded one, even if the rival chip has higher clock speeds, the white paper asserted.

"While multiple threads is one way to go about it [processing applications], AMD's approach has been to throw real cores at the application," wrote Margaret Lewis, AMD director of software solutions, in response to an email query. AMD currently produces Opteron in 2, 4 and 6-core versions. Later this year, it will introduce 8 and 12 core versions that will be competitive with T3, she said.

Shannon Poulin, Intel's Xeon marketing director, acknowledged there had been some movement to integrate more software on hardware before the merger but businesses mostly still purchase servers and software separately. "Whether an Oracle/Sun combination changes that dynamic is something that will be closely watched," he said.

Sun's T2 is used to build the T5440 server, cited as a premier product at the Jan. 27 briefing, and often used by telecommunications carriers. It starts at $26,000, according to third party reseller information posted on the Web. Servers based on Intel and AMD processors can frequently be purchased for under $8,000 or $9,000.

Gillett said Oracle intends to keep UltraSparc competitive as a foundation for high end appliances but expects it will forego direct competition for more share of the server market. Sun currently has 7.5% of the server market, compared to IBM, 31.8%; HP, 30.9%; Dell, 13.5%, Fujitsu, 5.7%; with other manufacturers producing a combined 10.6%, according to IDC market research.

Another observer, Tom Halfhill, analyst with The Microprocessor Report, attended the Jan. 27 briefing and came away convinced that the Oracle road map breathes new life into the UltraSparc architecture for 3-5 years. He said he didn't hear any time frame in which the successors to the T3 and M3 will appear. "There were no dates beyond this year. There were no code names for the projects," he noted. To be convinced, he would have preferred Oracle give the successor chips names and lay out a time frame in which they would appear.

And, Halfhill noted, there was no further mention of the chip that Sun in 2005-2007 had focused its highest performance hopes on, codenamed Rock. Sun talked about the chip as AMD launched successive generations of Opteron and Intel prepared to launch Nehalem (now the Xeon 5500) and has never confirmed that the project has been discontinued, despite media reports to the contrary.

Both Intel and AMD x86 instruction set chips appeared to be striding away from UltraSparc technically, when Rock talk flourished. In 2009 Intel finished investing $7 billion in fabrication plants that are producing 32 nanometer circuits for Intel Core i5 processors. Ultrasparc T2 is still on 65 nanometer circuits; plans are to produce T3 on 45 nanometer circuits.

It's possible the higher transistor concentration allowed by the smaller circuits will catch up at some point with Sun's higher thread count. Intel has launched its own assault on thread counts by doubling from one to two the number of threads its processors can execute, Halfhill pointed out.

On the other hand, chips with high thread counts are ideal for processing big workloads with many small tasks, such as in telecommunications or on highly trafficked Web sites. High-end application appliances may be a natural niche for the UltraSparc processors but Oracle still has to convince both its own and Sun's customers of the concept.

Michael Schultheiss, Unix systems specialist at Indiana University, said his IT organization is a user of Oracle databases and applications. "We've done a lot of migration from traditional Unix on non-x86 platforms to Linux on x86. I can only imagine that would continue," he warned, in an email response to a query. "I think the price point would have a lot to do with whether we would purchase an entire stack from Oracle," he said.