Storage outfit, turned hardware expert, Oracle has been showing off the performance of its new SPARC T4-4 servers.
Oracle has a bit to prove as it has to convince punters of the benefits of hardware and software engineered to work together, and justify to shareholders why it bought the substantially hardware orientated Sun Microsystems.
Oracle claims that it has managed a TPC-H benchmark result at the three TB scale factor. If this were the case then Oracle's SPARC T4 servers now claim 12 world records set on various business-critical enterprise workloads and industry-standard benchmarks.
The TPC-H benchmark evaluates the performance of various Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing and Decision Support Systems for several standard database sizes.
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Solaris 11, which is the outfit's first cloud OS to work on the SPARC T4-4 server managed 205,792 QphH at 3000GB. All this, Oracle tells us with a price of $4.10/QphH@3000GB.
This is twice the performance per processor and more than a third cheaper than IBM's most recent result by an eight processor Power 780 server running Sybase.
Oracle adds that it is more bang for your buck because the T4-4's cost includes maintenance over three years.
In the case of providing a rival to its old chum HP, Oracle says that its system is 2.5 times faster performance per processor and is capable of loading the entire dataset in half the time of an eight processor HP DL980 server running Microsoft SQL Server.
Needless to say that benchmarks are often not real world figures and get lobbed around by marketing departments to prove their point. Different benchmarks have a habit of saying different things. However, Oracle can feel a little smug over this particular one as it should make up for all those comments about the beast being late and having pants specs .
"Oracle products don't really work well together. Oracle's sales force is extremely aggressive about pushing a suite of products, but has much fewer integration points than SAP. In fact, integration is usually left entirely up to the customer. Oracle is also very reluctant to talk about product roadmaps for fear that future products will cannibalize existing ones. The company makes more than 90% of its profits through maintenance fees, and will do whatever it takes to keep those fees flowing in. Gaughan also expressed some surprise that so many customers keep working with Oracle despite reporting that Oracle is "the most difficult vendor to deal with."
And, never mind the fact that the 11g client will not run on Windows 7 64bit. Who needs a Microsoft operating system anyway?
Now all that the customer NEEDS to do is ditch its hardware in favor of SPARC T4-4.