News

IBM's proposed acquisition of Red Hat for $34 Billion is remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly, $34 Billion is such a huge valuation.

We are excited to announce the release of Oracle's new four-socket x86 server, Oracle Server X5-4, based on Intel’s Haswell-EX processors. Designed with Oracle operating systems, Oracle virtualization, and Oracle Database in mind, this is the most powerful four-socket x86 server Oracle have ever built.

A little behind everyone else, ‘Big Red’ have released their Haswell based Intel X86 machines, with a few technical advantages over other Vendors. Early December saw the new X5 Oracle machines available for delivery. Featuring Intel E5-2600 v3 chips and NVMe SSDs for up to 6.4TB of high-bandwidth flash storage.

As part of the annual 'Hot Chips' convention, Oracle have released a couple of details about the hot-ly anticipated M7 incarnation of the SPARC CPU line up. Featuring 8 core clusters, and a total of 32 cores per socket the SPARC M7 has 10 Billion, yes BILLION transistors on one chip.

Last week (28/08/2013), Oracle unveiled details of the SPARC M6 cpu, with IBM in its crosshairs. Reaction is positive from those with memory hungry compute needs. Scalable to 96 sockets, the SPARC M6 should hold the attention of large corporations and governmental institutions.

Oracle will be announcing notable enhancements to the NAS solution offerings in the form of ZS3. This will include new systems, configuration options, and software features. Integration with ZS3 and Oracle Database will be a big talking point. The new ZFSSA will be outlined in mid September - replacing the ZFS Storage Appliance line.

Oracle have released their new x86 virtualization appliance, merging servers, storage and networking together into one stack. The Virtual Compute Appliance enables rapid, repeatable software-defined infrastructure deployment.

With the launch of the single socket, 16-core Fujitsu M10-1, it's now possible to build an incredibly powerful four node Oracle Cluster at a huge saving. One of the beauties of Oracle Standard Edition is that you can deploy Oracle RAC (Real Application Clustering) for free on the condition that your total CPU count doesn't exceed four.

In the heart of the City of London resides our Oracle Authorised Solution Centre. This state of the art centre is available to our clients as an invaluable resource. The Solution Centre offers proof of concept, technical demonstrations, performance benchmarks, product evaluations - as well as hands on or remote demonstrations.

Oracle have released their SPARC T5 processors and associated servers, together with the M5 processor and M5 server lineup - replacing the current Fujitsu made M Series. SPARC M5 processor is exactly the same as the M4 processor, only the name has changed to align with the T5. 

The long awaited SPARC T5 generation of processors should be announced this week by big red. Oracle claim almost immediate availability of the hardware, which is a big plus. They're also claiming that the T5 is the fastest processor in the world for database. We'll wait to see the TPC benchmarks before passing judgement.