Oracle have released new S7 chipped machines which are SPARC servers to run Solaris 11.3. This is an effort to produce scale out architectures with a commodity style SPARC chip. The servers use a chasssis similar to the existing x86 Oracle platforms with  1U and 2U variants. Each CPU is an 8-Core with 8 threads per core.

  • SPARC S7 processor extends SPARC M7’s Security in Silicon, Data Analytics Accelerators to scale-out
  • Up to 1.7X better per core efficiency than x86 systems for cloud applications
  • Integrated “system on chip” design for optimized architecture on 2-socket systems

The S7 chip brings software in Silicon enhancements from the M7 chips which may prove useful in certain application deployments. These servers do not replace the existing T7 or M7 chipsets which support many more sockets in a single physical server. 64GB memory DIMM’s are supported so you can achieve a 1TB memory server with a 2CPU variant. 64GB DIMMS are very expensive right now, I am not sure I would use these anytime soon! The examples below are maximum memory using 32GB DIMMS.

Example pricing:

1U 1*8CPU/64thread, 256GB mem, 4*600GB disks ~€13,770 (4 spare disk slots)

1U 2*8CPU/64thread, 512GB mem, 4*600GB disks ~€20,640 (4 spare disk slots)

2U 2*8CPU/64thread, 512GB mem, 4*600GB disks ~€21,600 (22 spare disk slots)

Contact Synoptix for great deals, trade-ins and virtualisation options for these servers.