Oracle today announced major new additions to the SPARC platform that for
the first time bring the advanced security, efficiency and simplicity of SPARC to the cloud. Built on the
new SPARC S7 microprocessor, the latest additions to the SPARC platform include new cloud
services, engineered systems and servers.
While the business benefits of the public cloud are increasingly clear, many organizations have yet to
move enterprise workloads to the cloud due to performance, security and management concerns. To
help eliminate those concerns and enable organizations to confidently move enterprise workloads to
the cloud, the new SPARC platform is designed from the ground up to economically improve on cloud
computing delivery of the most critical business applications and scale-out application environments.
The latest additions to the SPARC platform are built on the revolutionary new 4.27 GHz, 8-core/64-
thread SPARC S7 microprocessor with Software in Silicon features such as Silicon Secured Memory
and Data Analytics Accelerators, which delivers the industry’s highest per-core efficiency and enables
organizations to run applications of all sizes on the SPARC platform at commodity price points. All
existing commercial and custom applications will run on the new SPARC enterprise cloud services
and solutions unchanged with significant improvements in security, efficiency and simplicity.
“We are still in the early phases of cloud computing adoption and as the market matures,
organizations will increasingly move critical enterprise workloads to the cloud,” said John Fowler,
executive vice president, Systems, Oracle. “To enable our customers to take advantage of this next
stage of cloud computing to speed innovation, reduce costs and drive business growth, we are
focused on delivering proven enterprise-grade services such as the Oracle SPARC platform in the
Oracle Cloud.
Some of the key features of the new SPARC platform include:
Effortless Security: The latest additions to the SPARC platform are designed for security and
compliance and utilize Silicon Secured Memory capabilities to address malware attacks and
programming errors. Wide-key encryption ciphers and hashes enable a fully encrypted cloud with less
than two percent performance overhead. In addition, security is further enhanced through verified
boot, immutable content that prevents unauthorized changes, enforced secured updates and a trusted
and secure hardware and software supply chain that does not rely on intermediaries.
Breakthrough Efficiency: By taking advantage of the open APIs in the processor and integrated
Data Analytics Accelerators, which deliver up to 10x greater analytics performance spanning
enterprise, big data and cloud applications, the latest additions to the SPARC platform reduce latency
and cost. When compared to the x86 servers, the fully integrated S7-2 and S7-2L servers delivers up
to 100 percent better per core efficiency, 1.7x better per core Java performance efficiency, 1.6x per
core database OLTP performance efficiency, and 2-3x more bandwidth for high-traffic analysis and
cloud apps.
Straightforward Simplicity: Taking integration a step beyond the server, the Oracle MiniCluster S7-2
Engineered System dramatically simplifies the top four most challenging aspects of enterprise
computing: security and compliance; high availability; patching and administration; and performance
tuning. By eliminating the need for a standard platform or OS and reducing security and database
administration time and effort, the new Engineered System enables organizations to:
Secure systems by default by eliminating enterprise security expertise requirements
Automate compliance monitoring and auditing in order to maintain the secure state of the system
over time
