X86 Economy with new Oracle SPARC S7 servers
Oracle enters the lower price segment of enterprise-class servers, but does not lose the technologies characteristic of its high-level systems. This article describes the family of processors and servers S7, replenish the range of the latest developments of the company and are already available to the consumer.
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The family of processors and servers of the lines of Oracle T7, M7 and S7 implements all the advanced technologies that have emerged in recent years
Larry Ellison presents the latest hardware development of the company, implemented in the processor M7
New Oracle Server Family
Until recently, a new family of processors and servers based on them announced in 2014 was limited to the following range. Solaris OS 11.3 or later is recommended for all configurations.
SPARC T7-1 . 32-core 4.1 GHz M7 CPU, up to 512 GB RAM, four 10Gb-E ports, up to eight 600 GB or 1.2 TB 2.5 inch SAS-3 disks, or up to eight 400 GB SSDs or four 1.6 Tv NVMe drives.
SPARC T7-2 . Two 32-core 4.1 GHz M7 CPUs, up to 1TV RAM, four 10Gb-E ports, up to six 600 GB or 1.2 TB 2.5 inch SAS-3 disks, or up to six 400 GB SSDs or four 1.6 Tv NVMe drives.
SPARC T7-4 . Two or four 32-core 4.1 GHz M7 CPUs, up to 2 TV RAMs, four 10Gb-E ports, up to eight 600 GB or 1.2 TB 2.5 inch SAS-3 disks, or up to eight 400 GB SSDs or eight 1.6 TB NVMe drives.
SPARC M7-8 . From two to eight 32-core 4.1GHz M7 CPUs, up to 4 TB RAM, up to 24 PCIe 3.0x16 slots.
SPARC M7-16 . Four to sixteen 32-core 4.1 GHz M7 CPUs, up to 8 TB RAM, up to 48 PCIe 3.0x16 slots.
SuperCluster M7 . A large number of custom configurations (Engineered Systems).
Now a small line of S7 processors and servers based on them has been added to these enterprise-class machines, designed for the budget use of the latest technologies on a remote office or division scale.
Economic prerequisites for creating S7
Recently, the benefits of public cloud environments for business have become increasingly apparent, but many organizations have not yet transferred their workloads to the cloud. They are concerned about performance, safety and control.
According to IDC, last year, investments in cloud IT infrastructure, including private and public clouds, increased by 21.9% in the world to $ 29 billion. In the fourth quarter of 2015, its share was 32.2% of the total corporate spending 7 only the consumer. to ensure the highest efficiency for today's most popular applications with the lowest possible IT infrastructure. According to the IDC forecast, by 2020 almost 50% of such annual costs will be accounted for by cloud solutions. In monetary terms, this will amount to $ 57.8 billion.
Many customers are quickly moving from expensive systems to x86 “boxes”, on which private and hybrid clouds are built everywhere. In order to keep these clients interested in SPARC systems, Oracle has entered the lower market segments and introduced systems with appropriate capabilities.
This initiative was officially announced by the company at the end of June 2016. It provides a new look at the SPARC processor and server family, which are now offered at the lowest initial price than Oracle has ever had before. At the same time, such systems will not be “the cheapest of the cheapest” - their minimum price will be about $ 11 thousand. At the same time, the price per computing core corresponds to that for x86 servers. After buying Sun, this is the loudest announcement by Oracle.
Analysts see new systems as a way to prevent SPARC and Solaris OS customers from churning out, as well as retaining existing customers.
The new processor is called S7. It is, in fact, a less powerful version of the high-end M7 chip, launched in October 2015. Plans for the S7, which was then called the Sonoma, were schematically announced in 2015, and the first products were presented on June 29 to OpenWorld 2015 in October.
S7 processor chip (Sonoma) has incorporated a whole bunch of advanced technologies
Compared to x86 processors, Oracle S7 has several advantages, in particular, built-in tools for accelerating data analytics, encryption and security, input / output
The S7 is based on the same fourth-generation SPARC core as the M7, and is produced using the same 20-nm process. However, it has only eight cores instead of 32 in M7. Like the M7, the new chip has a built-in “software on the chip” (Software in Silicon) to speed up the work of the DBMS and security functions.
S7 also has integrated memory and I / O interfaces, which are separate for the M7 and are located on the motherboard. This significantly reduces the cost of the final S7 server configuration.
In addition, today only one version of the S7 processor is offered, operating at 4.27 GHz. It is designed to provide the highest efficiency for today's most popular applications at the lowest possible price for the consumer.
As a result, Oracle announced two standalone servers with a new chip, S7-2 and S7-2L, as well as an “Engineered System” MiniCluster S7-2, which is a smaller version of the Oracle SuperCluster.
The S7-2 server constructively occupies one footprint in a rack (U1) and is designed for maximum density. It is sold in single and dual processor configurations.
S72L server is a more powerful model. It takes up two seats in a rack (U2), typically has two processors and allows you to create several storage configurations. Both servers can use SAS and NVMe storage in any combination.
For $ 11 thousand, the customer will receive a configuration with a single processor, 64 GB of memory and two hard disks of 600 GB each. The maximum configuration with two processors and a terabyte of memory will cost approximately $ 50 thousand.
While the “large” SPARC systems traditionally manage ERP and CRM applications, S7 servers are oriented towards more modern Java, Hadoop and Spark workloads.
S7-2 is the “low cost leader” for such intensive workloads as databases, business intelligence and a dense virtualized environment. It has three PCIe 3.0x8 slots, four 10G Base-T Ethernet ports and an Integrated Lights Out Management (ILOM) management port.
S7-2L has the same purpose, representing a "double" S7-2. It has six PCIe 3.0x8 slots and the same four 10G Base-T Ethernet ports and ILOM port. A significant difference is that the L model can use up to 27 hard drives. For a product of this class, with 128 GB of RAM and a 24.6 TB disk array, the price of less than $ 20,000 does not seem too high.
S7 line server constructs and related cloud service
Oracle MiniCluster S7-2
For mid-tier solutions that require the security and performance benefits of the optimized Oracle SuperCluster hardware and software systems, Oracle also introduced the new Oracle MiniCluster S7-2.
Engineered System MiniCluster S7-2 gives you all the benefits of Engineered Systems with an enterprise class security level. Simplified management, running out-of-the-box, high reliability, and a small form factor make it an excellent choice for remote and small offices, as well as isolated workloads. If the workload grows, you can use a simple regular configuration tool in MiniCluster and add more processors to the system within a few minutes.
Acceleration of the database is achieved not only due to the processor, but also due to the high I / O speed of all-flash storage. The corresponding security modes (PCI-DSS or CIS) are activated by simply pressing a button.
With full application and database compatibility with the SuperCluster M7, the Oracle MiniCluster enables organizations to significantly reduce hardware and software costs.
This new suite is designed to support solutions such as multi-tenant consolidation of applications and / or databases, computing platforms for remote offices / branches and testing / development environments.
Oracle does not quote MiniCluster prices, but is expected to expand the market for its engineered systems, providing the client with computing power, information storage and networking components in a preconfigured box, with pre-installed virtualization and management software.
The big difference between MiniCluster and SuperCluster is that the installation and administration here are mostly automated. Thus, customers can actually get the levels of security and availability (high-availability) of a larger machine, while less needing Solaris OS specialists.
"Software in Silicon for the Masses"
The M7 processor implementing this new paradigm in the CPU architecture, which transferred the main program code “to silicon” was released about two years ago.
The biggest problem of many organizations is the high initial price of the acquired new server. Not all of them need 32 cores. Therefore, Oracle has cut the M7 fourfold, but not only retained all its capabilities, but also added several new advantages.
One of them is low power consumption. Most of the logic is transferred from the motherboard directly to the CPU, which improves system performance and reduces production costs.
Interestingly, the S7 processor includes an integrated on-chip InfiniBand controller for integrating servers into high-speed clusters. But none of the new systems use this feature yet, preferring Ethernet as a simpler option. In this regard, Oracle's recommendation is: “customers can use an expansion board for InfiniBand if they want.”
All systems are running the Solaris OS. With Solaris, the client has several advantages over Linux, including hardware virtualization technology LDOMs and related software.
The Solaris OS provides high security with a large number of options based on role-based access, built-in compliance and enterprise automation reports, which are a standard part of the OS. A Linux administrator can quickly master Solaris, since many commands are identical or similar.
S7 - safety, efficiency, simplicity
So, the new members of the SPARC family are based on the new 8-core, 64-line microprocessor SPARC S7 with a clock frequency of 4.27 GHz and the Software in Silicon functions, which include Silicon Secured Memory and Data Analytics Accelerator.
Today, S7 systems provide the industry's highest performance per computing core and allow organizations to run applications of any scale on the SPARC platform at the prices of inexpensive mass-use servers.
All applications used in the organization will work on new corporate cloud services and SPARC solutions without any changes with a significant increase in security, efficiency and simplicity. Key features of the new SPARC platform are as follows.
Safety The new S7 family of servers provides security and regulatory compliance with Silicon Secured Memory features that protect against malicious intrusions and programming errors. Hardware acceleration of encryption algorithms and hash functions allows you to implement a fully protected cloud environment while reducing performance by less than 2%.
In addition, an additional level of security is provided through controlled downloads, unmodified content that prevents unauthorized modifications, forced updates of security tools, and a reliable chain of hardware and software vendors that do not have intermediaries.
Efficiency . New servers reduce delays and costs. Integrated accelerators Data Analytics Accelerator provide a 10-fold increase in performance when performing analytical queries in enterprise and cloud applications and solutions for processing big data,
Compared to x86 servers (in terms of kernel), fully integrated S7-2 and S7-2L servers are up to 100% more efficient. They provide increased performance by 1.7 times for Java applications and 1.6 times for OLTP database applications, as well as 2-3 times more bandwidth for high-loaded analytical queries and cloud applications.
Simplify The optimized hardware and software complex Oracle MiniCluster S7-2 raises the integration level above the server. This greatly simplifies the four most complex aspects of enterprise computing — security and compliance, high availability, updating and administration, and performance tuning. The complex allows the following organizations.
- ensure the protection of systems by default, eliminating the need for corporate security experts;
- automate compliance monitoring and auditing in order to constantly maintain the safe state of the system;
- support the smooth operation of services using high availability tools built into hardware and software;
- maintain the current state of the system, including updates of the security system software, - due to the simple deployment of service packs for the entire solution stack;
- improve the performance of databases and applications through automatic performance tuning.
Thanks to the Software in Silicon technology, the new cloud services and systems based on the SPARC S7 processor provide economics of the x86 mass server level and significant enterprise-class functionality for security and analytical tasks.
These products are designed to seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructure and include fully integrated virtualization and management for cloud environments.
The new Oracle SPARC Cloud service, which is now part of the SPARC family, is a dedicated computing service that provides organizations with a simple, secure, and efficient computing platform in the cloud.
This product extends the full range of cloud services provided by Oracle so that organizations can quickly create and deploy feature-rich applications — or expand Oracle Cloud Applications — on an enterprise-class cloud platform.
Thus, Oracle now offers a wide range of cluster configurations - from the older model (Oracle SuperCluster) to middle-class systems.
Analytical company Insight 64 noted that “S7 servers are designed for organizations that do not need the power of M7 systems, but are afraid to transfer their applications to x86. This approach looks promising for expanding the current Oracle client base. ”
')
The family of processors and servers of the lines of Oracle T7, M7 and S7 implements all the advanced technologies that have emerged in recent years
Larry Ellison presents the latest hardware development of the company, implemented in the processor M7
New Oracle Server Family
Until recently, a new family of processors and servers based on them announced in 2014 was limited to the following range. Solaris OS 11.3 or later is recommended for all configurations.
SPARC T7-1 . 32-core 4.1 GHz M7 CPU, up to 512 GB RAM, four 10Gb-E ports, up to eight 600 GB or 1.2 TB 2.5 inch SAS-3 disks, or up to eight 400 GB SSDs or four 1.6 Tv NVMe drives.
SPARC T7-2 . Two 32-core 4.1 GHz M7 CPUs, up to 1TV RAM, four 10Gb-E ports, up to six 600 GB or 1.2 TB 2.5 inch SAS-3 disks, or up to six 400 GB SSDs or four 1.6 Tv NVMe drives.
SPARC T7-4 . Two or four 32-core 4.1 GHz M7 CPUs, up to 2 TV RAMs, four 10Gb-E ports, up to eight 600 GB or 1.2 TB 2.5 inch SAS-3 disks, or up to eight 400 GB SSDs or eight 1.6 TB NVMe drives.
SPARC M7-8 . From two to eight 32-core 4.1GHz M7 CPUs, up to 4 TB RAM, up to 24 PCIe 3.0x16 slots.
SPARC M7-16 . Four to sixteen 32-core 4.1 GHz M7 CPUs, up to 8 TB RAM, up to 48 PCIe 3.0x16 slots.
SuperCluster M7 . A large number of custom configurations (Engineered Systems).
Now a small line of S7 processors and servers based on them has been added to these enterprise-class machines, designed for the budget use of the latest technologies on a remote office or division scale.
Economic prerequisites for creating S7
Recently, the benefits of public cloud environments for business have become increasingly apparent, but many organizations have not yet transferred their workloads to the cloud. They are concerned about performance, safety and control.
According to IDC, last year, investments in cloud IT infrastructure, including private and public clouds, increased by 21.9% in the world to $ 29 billion. In the fourth quarter of 2015, its share was 32.2% of the total corporate spending 7 only the consumer. to ensure the highest efficiency for today's most popular applications with the lowest possible IT infrastructure. According to the IDC forecast, by 2020 almost 50% of such annual costs will be accounted for by cloud solutions. In monetary terms, this will amount to $ 57.8 billion.
Many customers are quickly moving from expensive systems to x86 “boxes”, on which private and hybrid clouds are built everywhere. In order to keep these clients interested in SPARC systems, Oracle has entered the lower market segments and introduced systems with appropriate capabilities.
This initiative was officially announced by the company at the end of June 2016. It provides a new look at the SPARC processor and server family, which are now offered at the lowest initial price than Oracle has ever had before. At the same time, such systems will not be “the cheapest of the cheapest” - their minimum price will be about $ 11 thousand. At the same time, the price per computing core corresponds to that for x86 servers. After buying Sun, this is the loudest announcement by Oracle.
Analysts see new systems as a way to prevent SPARC and Solaris OS customers from churning out, as well as retaining existing customers.
The new processor is called S7. It is, in fact, a less powerful version of the high-end M7 chip, launched in October 2015. Plans for the S7, which was then called the Sonoma, were schematically announced in 2015, and the first products were presented on June 29 to OpenWorld 2015 in October.
S7 processor chip (Sonoma) has incorporated a whole bunch of advanced technologies
Compared to x86 processors, Oracle S7 has several advantages, in particular, built-in tools for accelerating data analytics, encryption and security, input / output
The S7 is based on the same fourth-generation SPARC core as the M7, and is produced using the same 20-nm process. However, it has only eight cores instead of 32 in M7. Like the M7, the new chip has a built-in “software on the chip” (Software in Silicon) to speed up the work of the DBMS and security functions.
S7 also has integrated memory and I / O interfaces, which are separate for the M7 and are located on the motherboard. This significantly reduces the cost of the final S7 server configuration.
In addition, today only one version of the S7 processor is offered, operating at 4.27 GHz. It is designed to provide the highest efficiency for today's most popular applications at the lowest possible price for the consumer.
As a result, Oracle announced two standalone servers with a new chip, S7-2 and S7-2L, as well as an “Engineered System” MiniCluster S7-2, which is a smaller version of the Oracle SuperCluster.
The S7-2 server constructively occupies one footprint in a rack (U1) and is designed for maximum density. It is sold in single and dual processor configurations.
S72L server is a more powerful model. It takes up two seats in a rack (U2), typically has two processors and allows you to create several storage configurations. Both servers can use SAS and NVMe storage in any combination.
For $ 11 thousand, the customer will receive a configuration with a single processor, 64 GB of memory and two hard disks of 600 GB each. The maximum configuration with two processors and a terabyte of memory will cost approximately $ 50 thousand.
While the “large” SPARC systems traditionally manage ERP and CRM applications, S7 servers are oriented towards more modern Java, Hadoop and Spark workloads.
S7-2 is the “low cost leader” for such intensive workloads as databases, business intelligence and a dense virtualized environment. It has three PCIe 3.0x8 slots, four 10G Base-T Ethernet ports and an Integrated Lights Out Management (ILOM) management port.
S7-2L has the same purpose, representing a "double" S7-2. It has six PCIe 3.0x8 slots and the same four 10G Base-T Ethernet ports and ILOM port. A significant difference is that the L model can use up to 27 hard drives. For a product of this class, with 128 GB of RAM and a 24.6 TB disk array, the price of less than $ 20,000 does not seem too high.
S7 line server constructs and related cloud service
Oracle MiniCluster S7-2
For mid-tier solutions that require the security and performance benefits of the optimized Oracle SuperCluster hardware and software systems, Oracle also introduced the new Oracle MiniCluster S7-2.
Engineered System MiniCluster S7-2 gives you all the benefits of Engineered Systems with an enterprise class security level. Simplified management, running out-of-the-box, high reliability, and a small form factor make it an excellent choice for remote and small offices, as well as isolated workloads. If the workload grows, you can use a simple regular configuration tool in MiniCluster and add more processors to the system within a few minutes.
Acceleration of the database is achieved not only due to the processor, but also due to the high I / O speed of all-flash storage. The corresponding security modes (PCI-DSS or CIS) are activated by simply pressing a button.
With full application and database compatibility with the SuperCluster M7, the Oracle MiniCluster enables organizations to significantly reduce hardware and software costs.
This new suite is designed to support solutions such as multi-tenant consolidation of applications and / or databases, computing platforms for remote offices / branches and testing / development environments.
Oracle does not quote MiniCluster prices, but is expected to expand the market for its engineered systems, providing the client with computing power, information storage and networking components in a preconfigured box, with pre-installed virtualization and management software.
The big difference between MiniCluster and SuperCluster is that the installation and administration here are mostly automated. Thus, customers can actually get the levels of security and availability (high-availability) of a larger machine, while less needing Solaris OS specialists.
"Software in Silicon for the Masses"
The M7 processor implementing this new paradigm in the CPU architecture, which transferred the main program code “to silicon” was released about two years ago.
The biggest problem of many organizations is the high initial price of the acquired new server. Not all of them need 32 cores. Therefore, Oracle has cut the M7 fourfold, but not only retained all its capabilities, but also added several new advantages.
One of them is low power consumption. Most of the logic is transferred from the motherboard directly to the CPU, which improves system performance and reduces production costs.
Interestingly, the S7 processor includes an integrated on-chip InfiniBand controller for integrating servers into high-speed clusters. But none of the new systems use this feature yet, preferring Ethernet as a simpler option. In this regard, Oracle's recommendation is: “customers can use an expansion board for InfiniBand if they want.”
All systems are running the Solaris OS. With Solaris, the client has several advantages over Linux, including hardware virtualization technology LDOMs and related software.
The Solaris OS provides high security with a large number of options based on role-based access, built-in compliance and enterprise automation reports, which are a standard part of the OS. A Linux administrator can quickly master Solaris, since many commands are identical or similar.
S7 - safety, efficiency, simplicity
So, the new members of the SPARC family are based on the new 8-core, 64-line microprocessor SPARC S7 with a clock frequency of 4.27 GHz and the Software in Silicon functions, which include Silicon Secured Memory and Data Analytics Accelerator.
Today, S7 systems provide the industry's highest performance per computing core and allow organizations to run applications of any scale on the SPARC platform at the prices of inexpensive mass-use servers.
All applications used in the organization will work on new corporate cloud services and SPARC solutions without any changes with a significant increase in security, efficiency and simplicity. Key features of the new SPARC platform are as follows.
Safety The new S7 family of servers provides security and regulatory compliance with Silicon Secured Memory features that protect against malicious intrusions and programming errors. Hardware acceleration of encryption algorithms and hash functions allows you to implement a fully protected cloud environment while reducing performance by less than 2%.
In addition, an additional level of security is provided through controlled downloads, unmodified content that prevents unauthorized modifications, forced updates of security tools, and a reliable chain of hardware and software vendors that do not have intermediaries.
Efficiency . New servers reduce delays and costs. Integrated accelerators Data Analytics Accelerator provide a 10-fold increase in performance when performing analytical queries in enterprise and cloud applications and solutions for processing big data,
Compared to x86 servers (in terms of kernel), fully integrated S7-2 and S7-2L servers are up to 100% more efficient. They provide increased performance by 1.7 times for Java applications and 1.6 times for OLTP database applications, as well as 2-3 times more bandwidth for high-loaded analytical queries and cloud applications.
Simplify The optimized hardware and software complex Oracle MiniCluster S7-2 raises the integration level above the server. This greatly simplifies the four most complex aspects of enterprise computing — security and compliance, high availability, updating and administration, and performance tuning. The complex allows the following organizations.
- ensure the protection of systems by default, eliminating the need for corporate security experts;
- automate compliance monitoring and auditing in order to constantly maintain the safe state of the system;
- support the smooth operation of services using high availability tools built into hardware and software;
- maintain the current state of the system, including updates of the security system software, - due to the simple deployment of service packs for the entire solution stack;
- improve the performance of databases and applications through automatic performance tuning.
Thanks to the Software in Silicon technology, the new cloud services and systems based on the SPARC S7 processor provide economics of the x86 mass server level and significant enterprise-class functionality for security and analytical tasks.
These products are designed to seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructure and include fully integrated virtualization and management for cloud environments.
The new Oracle SPARC Cloud service, which is now part of the SPARC family, is a dedicated computing service that provides organizations with a simple, secure, and efficient computing platform in the cloud.
This product extends the full range of cloud services provided by Oracle so that organizations can quickly create and deploy feature-rich applications — or expand Oracle Cloud Applications — on an enterprise-class cloud platform.
Thus, Oracle now offers a wide range of cluster configurations - from the older model (Oracle SuperCluster) to middle-class systems.
Analytical company Insight 64 noted that “S7 servers are designed for organizations that do not need the power of M7 systems, but are afraid to transfer their applications to x86. This approach looks promising for expanding the current Oracle client base. ”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/307082/
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