Oracle celebrates 25 years of SPARC Platform

Oracle this year is marking SPARC's 25th anniversary with concurrent events and programs running worldwide to commemorate the original SPARC innovation, its legacy and its continued success in transforming the enterprise IT infrastructure. Oracle also recently announced that its SPARC T4 servers featuring Oracle Solaris power mission-critical workloads in over 3,000 enterprises worldwide, nearly 4-times the number announced one year ago.

SPARC's legacy goes back to 1987, when Sun Microsystems (Now Oracle) developed a new microprocessor that was called Scalable Processor ARChitecture, or SPARC. The microprocessor was developed to deliver extreme performance to its customers and maximize the uptime and ROI of mission-critical enterprise applications.

Oracle is driving continued innovation in SPARC with a $5 billion a year spend on research and development. Oracle SPARC servers running Oracle Solaris continue to deliver world-record performance for a wide range of enterprise applications, so far it has achieved over 400 record benchmarks, with 20 of them currently standing. With 25 years of experience and still counting, SPARC is Oracle's biggest hardware install base, and Oracle continues to improve, upgrade and make engineering investments in SPARC technologies to consistently provide world-class server and application performance for a lower TCO.

"We are extremely proud and excited to celebrate this important milestone in SPARC's legacy of innovation. At Oracle, we maintain a strong commitment towards developing SPARC that continues to deliver highest value for our customers. Oracle will continue to innovate on SPARC platform and introduce new generation technology to help transform the IT landscape", said Mr. Adrian Jones, Senior Vice President, Hardware Sales, Asia Pacific and Japan Oracle Corporation.

Since its launch, SPARC technology has been at the heart of enterprise IT environments worldwide, transforming data centers with industry-leading performance and continuous innovation, and helping organizations build sustainable competitive advantage.

Mr. Venkatesh Krishnan, Vice President, Systems, Oracle India, said, "SPARC's inception was a milestone in enterprise computing and it successfully challenged the dominance of mainframes by delivering performance that was orders of magnitude ahead of the competing platforms. The SPARC family has grown from strength to strength for more than two decades now. Customers have shown complete faith in SPARC servers to run their mission-critical applications that require high performance, best-in-class availability, unmatched scalability and unparalleled reliability."

Today, leading enterprises worldwide and in (country) have adopted the latest generation of SPARC servers to control costs, reduce system complexities, for faster server operations and data security.

Commenting on the occasion, Mr. TS Purushothaman, VP - IT, Reliance BIG Entertainment said, "A quarter of a century in business and SPARC still looks young with its system offerings that are easy to install, deploy and manage. We preferred SPARC servers as it delivers best in terms of reliability and predictability to provide a consistent IT experience to business users and partners at an attractive price/performance and TCO. We have been using SPARC/Solaris Platform for more than 4 years now and it has helped us respond well to the changing business dynamics of our vibrant Entertainment Industry."

"We have had a great experience with SPARC-based servers for more than five years now and we believe that SPARC's combination of superior price performance combined with flexibility and scalability is well-suited for our IT environment. The tight integration between Solaris and Oracle's SPARC hardware gives a much better performance than the other alternatives available. Our mission-critical applications and databases have been running on the M5000 series with 0% downtime till date. Our heartiest congratulations to Oracle, for the completion of 25 vibrant, productive and fruitful years of SPARC technology," said Tarun Kumar, CTO, Tikona Digital Networks.

Oracle's SPARC T4 servers deliver superior performance versus comparable servers with 18 world records to date, on a wide range of industry standard benchmarks and application workloads, including Oracle Customer Relationship Management and the Oracle E-Business Suite.

For the months ahead, Oracle's technology roadmap for SPARC sets objectives for significant performance improvements every two years. As a result, SPARC customers can expect 2 to 6 times faster throughput and 20 to 50 percent better single-thread performance in coming years. The roadmap also illustrates Oracle's assurance to maintain SPARC/Oracle Solaris binary compatibility with the hundreds of thousands of deployments over more than two decades.

"I am glad to say that to date Oracle has delivered more than what we had promised on the SPARC and Oracle Solaris roadmap and we will continue to work towards achieving the targets we have set for SPARC servers," added Mr. Krishnan.