SPARC T4: Launched 2011-09-26

[Oracle SPARC T4 Processor]

SPARC T4: Launched 2011-09-26


Product Launch

The Register covered the T4 product launch in an article as well as the Oracle's SPARC SuperCluster in an additional article. The writer was kind enough to include images of the new systems being released based upon the new SPARC T4 silicon.

A simple PDF data sheet on the new Oracle SPARC T4 processor is available on Oracle's web site. On Monday, September 26, 2010 - a presentation and product launch was conducted. The Event Replay is available on-line, but some of the highlights are as follows.


SPARC T4 Announcement

Some features outlined included:

• high throughput: 8 cores, 8 threads per core
• high thread performance: clock rate: 2.85GHz and 3.00 GHz.
• high-thread performance: single thread can use whole core
  
• high thread performance: Out of Order execution
• 4x on-chip DDR3 Memory Controller Channels
• 2x on-chip 10GigE networking
• 2x on-chip x8 PCIe 2nd generation I/O interfaces
• 18 on-chip crypto engines

Price/Performance Comparison

Some price/performance comparisons were made between a T4-4 cluster and IBM POWER 7 system.



2010 Roadmap Reminder

The market was reminded of the 2010 SPARC processor road map and how other vendors refused to release a public road map.

IBM recently released a historical road map with no dates for POWER, but it seem they might be behind.



2011 Roadmap Prediction

Oracle illustrated how SPARC is beating their road map:

• New T4 processor in advanced customer installations today
• New T4 processor shipping today for normal customers
• New T5? processor for 2012, delivery projected 6-12 months early
• New T6? processor for 2013

2012 SPARC T5?

Details for the next processor, SPARC T5? scheduled to arrive next year in 2012, revealed.

On-Chip Enhancements

• More crypto enhancements
• Oracle RDBMS "numbers" acceleration
• Hardware Decompression (I requested this a few years back!)
• Memory Versioning (is this Transactional Memory?)
• Low Latency Clustering
  

Performance Enhancements

• Higher core clock rate
• Multiple pipelines per core
  
• More Cores per Socket
• Larger chip caches
• More memory bandwidth

Revisited: Oracle Database Licensing

Abstract:
Oracle licenses it's RDBMS by several factors, typically the Standard License (by socket) and an Enterprise License (by core scaling factor.) Occasionally, hardware and operating system vendors will enhance their offerings, requiring a revisit by database vendors to expand their legal categorizations for licensing. Oracle's guiding documents are readily available on-line.

Reason for Revisit:
A fairly extensive set of documents were posted over the past few years, but the URL's to these documents have changed, roughly since the acquisition of Sun by Oracle. Those core documents are listed below with why one might need to reference them.

Software Investment Guide
The Oracle Software Investment Guide is perhaps the most thorough document on performing Oracle installations within an organization. Perhaps these few sentences from the guide best describes what it contains.

We provide a detailed overview on how to license all Oracle products, from the Oracle database platform and application server to all Oracle enterprise applications, which includes Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeoplSoft, and JD Edwards.

Nine easy-to-read sections enable you to find the topics that interest you most. Within every section, each specific topic has hyperlinks and toll free numbers that enable you to get more information on the subject matter.

Additionally, we've included illustrations to enhance your understanding of our pricing practices related to data environments, batch processing, and more.

Pricing information on Oracle services, such as Support, Outsourcing, Consulting, and Education is also here.

This guide is clearly not isolated to merely Oracle Databases, but it is an authoritative source.

Database Licensing:
Oracle regularly updates their Database Licensing guideline document. Terminology such as Test, Production, Sockets, and Processors are defined within this document. Finer details which are often commonly asked questions include: development databases are normally no charge, but test and production databases must be purchased; Oracle Standard Editions may be charged by socket, but more advanced features means per-processor or per-user licensing must occur with Oracle Enterprise Edition; when dealing with IBM & Intel CPU's, "each chip in the multi-chip module is counted as one occupied socket."

Partitioning:
Oracle regularly updates their Server/Hardware Partitioning document, as system vendors create new technologies. Rigorous vendors create technologies categorized under "Hard Partitioning" (i.e. Capped Solaris Containers) while less rigorous vendors often create "Soft Partitioning" technologies (i.e. VMWare.) Some virtualization technology can be implemented as both Hard or Soft Partitioning, so implementation details must be attended to (i.e. Oracle VM implementation notes.) Costs can be controlled through careful architecture decisions, if one understands how a "Processor" is counted in such virtual environments.

Processor Core Factors:
Oracle regularly updates their Processor Core Factor Table, as new CPU designers release new central processor units. Certain multi-core CPU sockets with close throughput but vastly different core counts often have very different pricing (i.e. 16 core SPARC T3 "0.25" vs 8 core SPARC T4's "0.50" factor.)

Commercial Price List:
Oracle's standard Commercial Technology Price List which includes the database packages, is also published in PDF. While this price list changes regularly, Oracle specifies the retail pricing for databases such as: Standard Edition One, Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, additional add-on components, etc.

In Conclusion:
It would be wise to track these changes to these documents, as new purchases are required, and new architectures are being developed.

Solaris 10: Update 10 - Released!

Solaris 10: Update 10 - Released

Solaris 10 Update 10 has been released, note the "What's New" document.

Performance Enhancements Include:

• Faster ZFS performance
• Faster boot, with option to skip POST
  
• Faster upgrades: Live Upgrade on ZFS root partition, instead of mirrors
  
• Faster installation: use Flash Archive on ZFS root using text mode
• Faster reboot: option to skip some POST tests
• Enhanced throughput leveraging smt_pause for busy-wait or idle loops
• Enhanced throughput: 64 bit libmtmalloc, atomic operations replace locks
• Faster memory: 64 bit libmtmalloc, matrix lookups replace linked list
• Use libmtmalloc for applications with threads>=16
• Use libumem for applications with threads <16
• Disk I/O improvement for SSD's with poor read-modify-write firmware
• Improved I/O performance under Nahalem-EX platforms
• Improved floating point, audio, video processing with Intel AVX Support
• Faster Oracle startup/shutdown with ISM and DISM improvements
• Faster high-speed networking for x86 bnx driver Jumbo Frame support
• Increased network performance through bge driver MSI support
• Faster RAC 11g via Remote Direct Memory Access interfaces via RDSv3
  

ZFS Improvements Include:

• Set file system properties in a sent/received snapshot stream
• ZFS Diff: Determine differences between snapshots
• ZFS Recovery: Import a pool missing an intent log file
• ZFS Recovery: Import a damaged pool read-only
• ZFS Synchronous Behavior: standard, always, disabled
• Interval and Count for zpool: list and status

New Capabilities Include:

• Greater than 2 terabyte memory support
• Solaris Volume Manager clustered dataset import for recovery
• User extensibility for up to 1024 group membership
• SaMBa upgrade to 3.5.8
  
• x86 BASH upgrade to 3.2
  
• Apache C++ standard library upgrade to 4
  

Observability Enhancement Include:

• ZFS Difference capability
• Processor Group (pginfo) OS performance hardware view
• Processor Group (pgstat) hardware and software utilization
• Logical disk name to JBOD or blade chassis bays (diskinfo) view

Security Enhancements Include:

• LDAP name service tol functionality without LDAP being configured
• IVv6 NAT on IPFilter
• Solaris Cryptographic and Key Management Framework support for OKM
• Additional AES cyphers in kernel SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
• New Passwords no longer unlock accounts
• Password construction policy applies to root by default
• SSH supports chroot capability
  

Device Support Enhancements Include:

• Intel ixgbe driver support for: 82599, x540/x540T
  
• Intel igb driver support for: 82576, 82580, i350
• Intel e1000g 82579LM/LF LOM controllers: 1502,1506, 1519
• Broadcom bge driver support: BCM5717, BCM5724
• QLogic P3+ FCoE CNA Ethernet qlcnic and device support
• Mellanox ConnectX-2 10GigE mcxnex/mcxe drivers for GLDv3
• Intel Patsburg SCU support: ld60, ld61, ld64, ld65, ld68, ld69
• LSI MegaRAID Falcon SAS 2.0 HBA device via imraid_sas
• LSI SAS 2308 HBA storage device via mpt_sas
• LSI SAS 2208 HBA device via mr_sas
• Public Generic LAN Driver interface for bge
  

Oracle License Change: Add SPARC T4

(Oracle SPARC T4 micrograph)

Oracle License Change: Add SPARC T4

Abstract

Oracle licenses it's RDBMS by several factors, typically the Standard License (by socket) and an Enterprise License (by core scaling factor.) Occasionally, Oracle will change the core scaling factor, resulting in discounting or liability for the consumer.

The Platform

The SPARC CPU from Oracle is an implementation of the SPARC V9 open specification. There have been several series of chips based upon this implementation: T1, T2, T2+, and T3. The T1 & T2 are both single socket implementations, while the T2+ and T3 are a multi-socket implementation. Oracle has released on their roadmap that the SPARC T4 processor will be coming out shortly.

The Addition

The SPARC T4 has been added to the Oracle RDBMS "Processor-Core Factor Table".

Factor Vendor/Processor
0.25 SUN UltraSPARC T1 <1.4GHz
0.25 Oracle SPARC T3
0.50 SUN UltraSPARC T1 1.4GHz
0.50 SUN UltraSPARC T2+ Multicore
0.50 Fujitsu SPARC VII+
0.50 Oracle SPARC T4
0.75 SUN UltraSPARC IV, IV+, or earlier
0.75 Fujitsu SPARC64 VI, VII
0.75 SUN UltraSPARC T2

Note, Green is new. Oracle has added the T4 processor with a core factor of 0.50.

Impacts to Network Management Infrastructure

It appears that Oracle will be releasing SPARC T4 into production. Purchasing should be watched very closely during this transition period.

If there is the need for increased thread performance, the 8 core T4 may be leveraged instead of the 16 core T3, with no impact to Oracle licensing when databases require an RDBMS.

The UltraSPARC IV+ 21.GHz processors had some of the best single-threaded performance characteristics of any SPARC processor ever produced (albeit, the throughput pales in comparison to any of the newer generation of multicore SPARC systems.)

The Oracle SPARC T4 finally looks like a good candidate to replace those old SUN UltraSPARC IV+ systems, which are so highly cherished for their single thread performance. There is probably no better Network Managment platform to consider at this point in time.

IBM POWER Roadmap... 7+ now late and only an almost 3 years projection for 8?

IBM POWER Roadmap... 7+ now late and only an almost 3 year projection for 8?

An image speaks a thousand words, late today with a blue box for a future, just before the Oracle SPARC T4 release?


Thank you for the IBM August 2011 POWER Roadmap tha the public marketplace has been begging for... did we miss the POWER7+ release??? A POWER 7 February 2010 launch would have POWER 7+ August 2011 launch (and today is August 31, so unless there is a launch in the next 23 hours, it looks late to me.)

Sketchy details on something possibly 3 years out??? No commitment beyond (almost) 3 years for POWER???

POWER has been quite interesting, for being cobbled together via multi-chip modules. Certainly a less risky approach, but a more expensive approach which does not offer flexibility of mass-production. Of course, there was never a delusion in the standard POWER family of trying to "make it big" - those days are long gone, with the former IBM partnership with Apple and Motorola.

It is nice to see embedded POWER in some video game machines and cell phones, but we have not seen a commodity desktop chip in a long time.

SPARC Open CPU Architecture Roadmap

With multiple vendors developing SPARC, where anyone can develop SPARC processors, without resriction - IT executives and government organizations may feel more comfortable with another type of roadmap.

It would be nice if IBM the confidence in POWER that Oracle has in SPARC, who released a 5 year roadmap, where Oracle has been providing continual public updates as SPARC benchmarks have been met.

The new SPARC T processors have been on-time for every generational launch for the past 5 years, with Solaris Update 10 already leaked and T4 processors about to be released.

With the decision to invest in a processor based upon a single piece of silicon, the ability to mass-produce at lower cost created low-cost options for SPARC in the past, at a time when few companies were trying to produce low-cost, embedded and commodity processors.

With SPARC, we have not seen a commodity desktop workstation for the education and scientific markets in awhile, either. After the Ultra 45 Workstation and migration of the SunRay UltraThin Clients from MicroSPARC IIe, that was the last of a worthy line of systems.

The market is hoping to see something from another OEM vendor, since one might suspect Oracle is not terribly interested in anything other than servers, and there always seems to be an OEM vendor releasing a SPARC compatible portable or deskop. The upcoming T4 is a terrific candidate.

Network Management Considerations

There are multiple vendors who design and have been encouraged to design SPARC, from the United States, to the U.K., to Africa, to Europe, to Russia, to China, and to Japan. The SPARC application market is best when there are multiple governments, educational facilities, companies, and startups who are competing to produce a better (or, at least, available) design.

Markets with competition and open designs have always been better for the industry as well as the customers. There is a reason why Solaris is trusted in the telecommunications arena and has nearly 2x the number of applications than combined AIX and HPUX.

Solaris Tab - Solaris 10 Neworking Update

Solaris Tab - Solaris 10 Networking Update

The following has been added to the Solaris Tab for Networking information.

Solaris Reference Material
2009-07 [PDF] OpenSolaris Crossbow: Virtual Wire in a Box
2010-05 [HTML] Solaris 10 Neworking - The Magic Revealed
2011-08 [HTML] Solaris 11 Express Network Tunables

Technical Posts 2H August

Technical Posts 2H August

The following are technical articles related to Network Management in the past half-month.

• Security: Devastating' Apache bug leaves servers exposed
  
  Attack code dubbed “Apache Killer” that exploits the vulnerability in the way Apache handles HTTP-based range requests was published Friday on the Full-disclosure mailing list. By sending servers running versions 1.3 and 2 of Apache multiple GET requests containing overlapping byte ranges, an attacker can consume all memory on a target system.
  
  The denial-of-service attack works by abusing the routine web clients use to download only certain parts, or byte ranges, of an HTTP document from an Apache server. By stacking an HTTP header with multiple ranges, an attacker can easily cause a system to malfunction.
  
  
• Mobile: Dish eyes 4G LTE wireless network
  

  The radio spectrum owned by Dish, and LightSquared, is reserved for satellites, but as satellite transmissions have a hard time penetrating buildings and terrain operators are allowed to build an Ancillary Terrestrial Component* – infill transmitters operating at the same frequency as the birds and providing signal to those without line of sight.

  LightSquared turned that model on its head, suggesting that the ground-based network would be primary, with the satellite providing in-fill: estimated at around 2 per cent of traffic. LightSquared then successfully lobbied the FCC to permit it (and its wholesale customers) to ship equipment that isn't even capable of satellite communications, turning the company into a 4G network wholesaler without having to shell out for 4G spectrum.
  

• Security: Worm spreading via RDP
  
  an Internet worm dubbed “Morto” spreading via the Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

  F-Secure is reporting that the worm is behind a spike in traffic on Port 3389/TCP. Once it’s entered a network, the worm starts scanning for machines that have RDP enabled. Vulnerable machines get Morto copied to their local drives as a DLL, a.dll, which creates other files detailed in the F-Secure post.

  SANS, which noticed heavy growth in RDP scan traffic over the weekend, says the spike in traffic is a “key indicator” of a growing number of infected hosts. Both Windows servers and workstations are vulnerable.
  
  
• Cloud: Java arrives on Heroku code cloud
  

  Heroku – the multi-language "platform cloud" owned by Saleforce.com – is now running Java applications.

  Akin to Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, or VMware's Cloud Foundry, Heroku is an online service for building, deploying, and readily scaling applications. It was originally designed for Ruby on Rails apps, but has since expanded to Clojure, Node.js, and now Java.
  

• Mobile: Why Apple is Removing Unique Identifiers
  

  Apple is planning to phase out unique device identifiers from iOS 5, according to documentation sent out to developers, possibly to stop people worrying about their privacy on iPhones and iPads... they should "create a unique identifier specific to your app".

  [Wall Stree Journal] Henschel also pointed to the recent spat between the notoriously secretive Apple and analytics firm Flurry as a possible spur for the move. In January, Flurry reported that it had identified around 50 tablet devices in testing at Apple's campus in Cupertino using its analytics.
  

  "Some company called Flurry had data on devices that we were using on our campus – new devices," Jobs said live at the D8 conference in New York. "They were getting this info by getting developers to put software in their apps that sent info back to this company! So we went through the roof. It's violating our privacy policies..."
  

• Mobile: Nokia accidentally unveils OS it should have had in 2009
  
  Nokia is expected to unveil the a major refresh of its Symbian OS today, bringing it bang up to date with competitive phones from two years ago. Owners of more recent Symbian^3 models should be able to update their handsets eventually.
  

  Four new devices are expected to be unveiled – either today, or very shortly. The Belle update should keep loyalists happy for some time to come. Performance and usability appear to have been improved greatly.
  

• Cloud: Performance Monitoring is Someone Else's Problem
  

  “Amazon and Google don’t have an army of service operatives monitoring their farms,” says Graeme Swan, a partner at consultancy Ernst & Young. “They basically smashed as much infrastructure as they possibly could into warehouses, and then just assumed that capacity would be there. Now, clients are telling them they want a premium service. They are worried that they have no way of monitoring it or tweaking it. So there is no premium service.”

  You can buy as much premium support as you like (although some question how well it works). Premium performance streams? Not so much.
  

• Cloud: VMware turns shrink ray on open source dev cloud
  
  On Wednesday, the virtualization giant introduced Micro Cloud Foundry, a free downloadable version of its Cloud Foundry service that runs on a single laptop. This past spring, when VMware unveiled Cloud Foundry and open sourced the code behind it, the company indicated it would eventually offer a shrunken incarnation that would allow developers to test applications on their local machines.
  
  
• Cloud: VMware turns self into (virtual) database co.
  
  vFabric Data Director has a utility pricing model, as you would expect, at a cost of $600 per VM under management per year that is running a database image. vFabric Postgres, VMware's tweaked and tuned version of PostgreSQL, is available free of charge for developers and will be available for download starting today at cloudfoundry.com.
  
  If you put a vFabric Postgres image into production, then it costs $1,700 per VM per year. The underlying vFabric 5.0 Standard Edition costs $1,200 per VM per year, while the Advanced Edition, which has more bells and whistles, costs $1,800 per VM. The Advanced Edition includes RabbitMQ messaging and an SQL interface for GemFire called SQLFire.
  
  
• Cloud: Dell floats cloud built on ... VMware
  

  At the VMworld virtualization and cloud extravaganza in Las Vegas today, Dell said that it was fluffing up the Dell Cloud using VMware's brand-spanking-new ESXi 5.0 hypervisor, the vSphere 5.0 management tools for it, the vCloud Director cloud fabric, and the vCloud Connector extensions that allow a private cloud and a slice of a public cloud to be managed from the same console and to teleport jobs back and forth from the public and private clouds.

  The Dell Cloud comes out of the Dell Services unit, which is the amalgam of Dell's server and PC support business and consulting services practice with the Perot Systems system and application outsourcing business it acquired in September 2009 for $3.9bn.
  

• Cloud: HP mates blades with VMware vSphere
  
  The VirtualSystem VS2 configuration for vSphere 5.0 moves to a bladed server and bladed Lefthand P4800 SAN arrays. The VS2 setup has a dozen BL460c G7 two-socket Xeon blade servers and two BladeSystem c7000 blade server chassis. Each blade has a dozen cores running at 3.06GHz
  

  The largest VirtualSystem for vSphere 5.0 setup is the VS3 box, which is designed to support up to 6,000 VMs. This monster has four BladeSystem c7000 chassis, a total of 64 of HP's ProLiant BL460c G7 servers
  
  
• Mobile: Samsung 'considering purchasing' HP's orphaned webOS
  

  Samsung may be mulling over the purchase of webOS – recently orphaned by HP – in a move to protect itself from an increasingly unfriendly Apple and the threat of Google and its new toy, Motorola Mobility.

  Or so say "sources from notebook players", speaking with the Taiwanese rumor-and-news website, DigiTimes.

• Cloud: VMware orders vCloud army across five continents
  
  VMware envisions a world where applications can roam across one big intercloud. Apps won't just jump from internal data centers to public cloud services, the company believes. They'll move from cloud to cloud like phone calls across cell networks.

  That's why VMware is keen on getting its vSphere server virtualization not only in the corporate data center, but out there on the service providers who want to be the next Amazon EC2. Then VMware can own the corporate cloud computing on both sides of the firewall.
  

• Cloud: Citrix Cloud.com goes open source
  
  After taking control of the CloudStack cloud management framework through its acquisition of Cloud.com back in July, Citrix Systems is now open sourcing the code behind the tool. At the same time, it's adding support for the provisioning of workloads on additional hypervisors and, for the first time, on bare-metal machines.

  Cloud.com was founded in 2008 at about the same time as rival Eucalyptus Systems. It was known as VMOps before it came out of stealth mode in May 2010. Citrix is trotting out CloudStack 2.2.10, which has been certified to support rival VMware's ESXi 5.0 hypervisor, part of the vSphere 5.0 server virtualization stack that was annoumced in July and which started shipping last week.
  
  Citrix is trotting out CloudStack 2.2.10, which has been certified to support rival VMware's ESXi 5.0 hypervisor, part of the vSphere 5.0 server virtualization stack that was announced in July and which started shipping last week.
  

• Internet: The case for a free market in IPv4 addresses
  
  Officially, the world ran out of IPv4 addresses earlier this year, when a final batch of addresses was divided among the five Regional Internet Registries. There are still a lot of unused and underused IP addresses in the hands of various private organizations. All that is needed is an incentive for them to part with their unused addresses voluntarily. In other words, what's needed is a market in IP addresses.
  
  Earlier this year, Microsoft paid $7.5 million for two-thirds of a million IP addresses that were previously held by a bankrupt Nortel, suggesting that the going rate for an IP address is around $10.
  
  Ford, Merck, Xerox, Halliburton, and nearly a dozen other companies not primarily in the networking business were each given a Class A block of 16 million addresses. MIT also got a Class A block, and the UK government got two of them. The US government claimed about a dozen Class A blocks, giving it control of nearly 200 million addresses—more IP addresses than all of Latin America has today.
  
  
• Mobile: Sprint to get seat at grown-up table when iPhone 5 hits?
  

  Sprint will be the next carrier to offer the iPhone to customers in the US, according to sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The carrier will begin offering the iPhone 5 in October alongside AT&T and Verizon, both of which are also expected to begin selling the device mid-month, though it is believed that Sprint will also carry the iPhone 4, bolstering earlier rumors that Apple would keep around the iPhone 4 as the new low-cost replacement for the iPhone 3GS.

Network Management Connection

The transition from IP Version 6 from IP Version 4 may be a slow moving target. With companies like Microsoft buying large blocks and other companies holding millions - IP Addresses are like gold and oil. These investments may prove to not only be profitable, but the sale of these virtual goods may slow the implementation of IP V6.

Cloud Computing, based upon Virtualization technology from VMWare and Citrix open-sourced Xen continues to try to make inroads. Large system vendors like HP and Dell align themselves with proprietary VMWare. Oracle's VM technology maintains some level of compatibility with Citrix Xen. With Cloud Computing, the network becomes vastly more important.

Microsoft Windows has another WORM exposure, around it's proprietary RDP technology, based partially around file transfer options while UNIX Apache finds itself vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. These key infrastructure points underpin modern intranet and internet computing today, both putting pressure on "the network". The Apache DoS merely makes it "look like" a network problem while another Microsoft worm really creates a possible capacity issue with "the network", if it can't be controlled.

HP finds itself bailing out of the mobile handset market (with Samsung possibly trying to buy it up for patent protections) dominated by heavy weights like Google (who ate Motorola's handset division and creates a mostly open-sourced based Android solution), Apple (with it's popular iPhone BSD UNIX parially open sourced solution), and Oracle (who is assaulting Google for using Java without paying license fees, like every other mobile vendor does.)

The mobile market has the opportunity to heat up, with more mobile 4G vendors hitting the market. By diversifying 4G to include Satellite vendors, in conjunction with Cell Phone operators, as well as land-line operators, in addition to new WiMax vendors (i.e. Clear) - there is the opportunity for a real explosion in the mobile network arena... which will all need to be managed. With dominant smart phone vendors like Apple possibly releasing iPhone for Sprint - this could really grow their market, as ATT and Verizon raise their costs to customers.