During a press briefing this week, Oracle head Larry Ellison announced the launch of the SPARC Supercluster, a new high-performance enterprise computing system that couples Sun's processor architecture, UNIX-based Solaris operating system, and ZFS-based storage technology.

Oracle has extensively tested its own database software on the massive computer and says that it has achieved the highest database performance ever recorded. According to the company's benchmarks, Oracle on the SPARC Supercluster can perform 30 million database transactions per minute—reportedly 3 times faster than the previous record, which was held by IBM's DB2 on a P7 cluster.

The hardware configuration used to achieve the record was a single SPARC Supercluster with 108 SPARC T3 chips, for a total of 1,728 processor cores. The system also has 13TB of memory, 246TB of flash storage, and 1.7 petabytes of total storage capacity. Ellison, who giggled with excitement (seriously) during the presentation, giddily told the audience that the test involved pumping a quadrillion records into an Oracle database.

Respectful of IBM, scornful of HP

Ellison acknowledged that IBM is a formidable competitor with good products, but he contends that Oracle has raised the bar with its improvements to Sun's technology, putting its new SPARC-based offering in the lead. He says that the Supercluster's price-to-performance ratio beats IBM's best by 27 percent.

Although Ellison was relatively respectful towards IBM during the presentation, he was downright scornful of HP. Ellison compared HP's high-end computing products to a turtle, saying that the they were slow and highly vulnerable in the market. Oracle's benchmarks say that the Supercluster offers a 66 percent better price/performance ratio compared with HP. Ellison's public criticism of HP has grown increasingly caustic over the past few months, so it wasn't particularly surprising to hear him blast the company during his presentation.

Oracle obtained the SPARC and Solaris technology in its acquisition of Sun. Many of Sun's historically significant software assets and communities have been gutted by Oracle's aggressive and heavy-handed approach to management, but Oracle has clearly found a solid strategy for extracting value from Sun's server business. Ellison describes Oracle as wanting to be like the Apple of the server world, offering its own tightly-integrated hardware and software solutions in a combined package that will ostensibly be easier to manage and support. As part of that philosophy, Oracle is rolling out a new level of support called "Gold Standard Service" that will comprehensively cover pre-integrated Oracle product stacks.

Ellison clearly wants customers to gravitate towards all-Oracle solutions, but he stresses the fact that Oracle still recognizes the importance of choice. He says that Oracle will work with partners to create "Gold Standard" service offerings for tested combinations of products from Oracle and other vendors. He also played up the importance of Linux in Oracle's software business, saying that the company's efforts to elevate Solaris won't diminish its commitment to supporting its own Red Hat-based Linux platform.

Solaris 11

Ellison spoke briefly about Solaris 11, which will get new features and optimizations specifically for virtualization. He also emphasized the importance of integrating optimizations for flash storage, complaining that most software platforms simply aren't designed to make the most of the potential performance advantages of flash storage. Oracle doesn't want to leave performance on the table, he says, and is finding ways to "drive our flash memory much faster than somebody who just plugs in a flash disk."

It's hard to evaluate the validity of the performance characterizations without being able to see some truly independent benchmarks and real-world usage scenarios, but the results still look mightily impressive on paper. You can see the results of Oracle's own benchmarks on the company's website. It's a lot like Oracle has validated its decision to acquire Sun and is striving to make SPARC and Solaris more competitive.