Oracle provides Sparc road map, but questions linger

IDG News Service - Oracle has sketched out a five-year road map for Sun's Sparc-based servers, hoping to reassure customers about the future of the platform and reverse a pattern of declining sales.

John Fowler, the former Sun executive who runs Oracle's systems business, laid out the plans in a webcast from Oracle's headquarters Tuesday morning. In an interview beforehand, he also confirmed reports that Oracle has stopped designing x86-based servers with chips from Advanced Micro Devices, and has standardized on Intel processors.

Oracle will release regular updates to Sun's Sparc processors for at least the next five years, and "at least double application performance every other year" on Sparc-based systems, Fowler said. Sparc servers will scale from 32 cores and 4TB of memory today, to 128 cores and 64TB of memory by 2015, he said.

Fowler also announced that Solaris 11, the next big update to Sun's Solaris OS, will ship next year. It will include "major updates across almost every level of the stack," he said, including elements of Sun's Project Crossbow network virtualization technology. Solaris 11 will scale to "tens of terabytes of memory and thousands of processor threads," he said.

It was important for Oracle to articulate a road map for Sun's Sparc-based systems, sales of which have fallen sharply amid the uncertainty around Oracle's acquisition of Sun. Oracle has said from the start it will continue to develop Sparc but it has been light on the details.

Even after Tuesday some questions remained. Oracle has two families of Sparc processors -- the multi-threaded Ultrasparc chips that it develops in-house for its T series servers, and the Sparc64 chips manufactured by Fujitsu and sold in Oracle's high-end M series servers.

Fowler didn't address the two chip lines specifically, referring only to the future of Sparc in general. One analyst said Oracle may eventually use the Ultrasparc chips across both server families, the M series and the T series.

"If I look in my tea leaves, I would say over the next few years all of those systems -- the T series and the M series -- are likely to be built around the Sparc chips Oracle is designing in-house," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight64.

Such a move could reduce Oracle's development costs and give it complete control over the design of its servers. It could produce variations of the Ultrasparc chip, using different interconnects and cache sizes, for example, to make them suitable for the M series servers, Brookwood said.

Asked before the webcast about specific plans for the two chip families, Fowler said he would be talking "generically about Sparc." The two platforms are based on the same underlying architecture and can run the exact same software, so customers "aren't focused on that," he said.