Introduction
The S7 processors, like other Sparc chips, run Oracle’s Solaris Unix variant, and mainstream as Linux or Windows Server. Linux is dominating at back-end and front-end at many large enterprises from oracle. The sun oracle sparc S7 machines support Solaris 11.3 operating system specific. Solaris is bundled with the sparc system from Oracle, and Linux is prebundled on its X86 iron. The systems can support Oracle 11g Release 2 or Oracle 12c in the Enterprise Editions of the company’s database.
There are two rack-based machines that employ the S7 processor, plus a preconfigured MiniCluster system completes full-on engineered system like converged system complete with servers, storage, and switching.
- The Sparc S7-2 server
- Compute Optimized High-density on a rackmount design
- 1U box machine that has two processors with 8 or 16 cores, and can buy them with either one or two CPUs installed in 1RU.
- The base system comes with a four-port 10 Gb/sec Ethernet controller, like other Sparc and Xeon servers from Oracle,
- It has room for three 2.5-inch drives, which can be 600 GB or 1.2 TB SAS disks, 400 GB SAS flash drives, or 3.2 TB NVM-Express flash drives.
- The Sparc S7-2L server
- Storage, I/O optimized 16 core includes HDD,SSD, NVMe options.
- In a 2U form factor with two processors with 16cores configured in the box
- It has room for 24 2.5-inch drives or 15 3.5-inch drives.
- Oracle supports 8 TB SAS-3 disk drives in the 3.5-inch bays.
- 24 bay setup can have up to a dozen NVM-Express devices.
- The MiniCluster S2-7 Review
- The baby cluster built from two S7-2 servers and an Oracle disk array.
- It has a total of 32 cores and
- 1 TB of memory as configured using 32 GB memory sticks
- 8 TB of flash storage and 48 TB of disk storage.
- Oracle Cloud public cloud
Oracle is also selling dedicated instances based on S7 nodes on its Oracle Cloud public cloud.
Finally Oracle slowly switches its Exadata platform from Xeon to Sparc. But Oracle will continue to sell X86-based engineered systems
But clearly if Oracle really believes that Sparc machines are better, and then there should be a variant of Sparc Exadata, Sparc Exalogic, and Sparc Exalytics based totally on Sparc and clearly shows these machines outrunning Xeons.
Learn more about – SPARC “Sonoma” Sparc S7 Server Review