What is Oracle’s SuperCluster ? How it Works ?

Oracle supercluster is fastest and most scalable engineering systems specially designed for enterprise level computing.Don’t not think that supercluster is alternative product for sun cluster or veritas cluster. Supercluster is a complete setup which contains high performance servers,storage,networking and software in a single box.These system will only fit in large-scale datacenters.

The latest supercluster from oracle are 
1. Oracle SuperCluster T5-8
2. Oracle SuperCluster M6-32

Oracle SuperCluster(Ex: T5-8)
This system is designed for database and application and ideal for consolidation and private cloud.It has pre-integrated hardware and software which allows the rapid deployment of database and application.Here the image of oracle Supercluster T5-8 engineering system.

Front view:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rear View:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Server Module:
It has two SPARC T5-8 servers can run different version of oracle Solaris using virtualization.
It supports Oracle Solaris 11,Oracle Solaris 10, Oracle Solaris 9  and Oracle Solaris 8. 
Configuration:
1.Four or eight SPARC T5 processors 
2. 1TB or 2TB of memory in 32 or 64 DIMM slots
3.Eight 900GB Disks
4.Four on board 1GbE ports
5.Four or eight QDR Infiniband cards
6.Four or eight 10GbE cards
7.Optional Fiber channel PCIe Low profile cab be added to compute node

Processor Module:
SPARC T5 each processor has speed of 3.6GHz ,8MB or L3 cache,16cores and each core has 8 threads.It has 128KB of L2 cache.

Infiniband switches:
Each SuperCluster nodes comes along with three Infiniband switches.These switches are
low-latency high bandwidth Quad Data RaIe(QDR) InfiniBand switches provides the extremely scalable and reliable network fabric necessary to interconnect all the components within oracle SuperCluster and assure high performance for I/O intensive enterprise applications.

Storage:
Oracle Supercluster has inbuilt “ZFS Storage 7320 Appliance” as shared Storage with 60TB of capacity ,this clustered dual-controller configuration provides highly available shared 
storage to the application tier over the low-latency InfiniBand network.It uses Flash-enabled Hybrid storage pools to improve application response times.

Exadata Storage Server:
What is Exadata storage server ?
Exadata storage server is a storage subsystem to store the oracle database which is highly optimized and employs a massively parallel architecture and  Exadata Smart Flash Cache to dramatically accelerate Oracle Database processing and speed I/O operations.
This Servers disks can operate in parallel, reducing database server CPU consumption while using much less bandwidth to move data between storage and database servers.
Exadata storage servers will be interconnected with Database server using high speed infiniband(40Gbs) network.

Oracle Exadata Storage servers are included in every supercluster T5-8 and support both oracle Database 11g Release 2 and oracle Database 12c operations and provides outstanding performance for both transaction based and decision support workloads

Four to eight Exadata storage servers are available in SuperCluster T5-8. Four Exadata storage servers  can provides 144TB data storage and Eight Exadata servers can provides up to 288TB storage space depends  selection of high performance or high capacity disks.

Each Oracle Exadata storage server has 
1. 2x six core Inter Xeon E5-2630L Processor with 64GB of memory and 1.6TB of Exadata smart Flash cache 
2. 12×3.5inch disks deliverling up to 1.8 GB/second of uncompressed raw disk bandwidth per server 
3. Uncompressed usable capacity of up to 3.25TB per server when using High performance disks
4. Uncompressed usable capacity of up to 16TB per server when using High capacity disks
5. Dual-port QDR 40Gb/s  Infiniband HCA
6. Hybrid Columnar compression delivers 10x-15x compression ratios
7. Effective data bandwidth of up to 72.5GB/second per server with flash and uncompressed data

8. Effective data bandwidth of up to 72.5 GB/second per server with flash and compressed data 

Complete overview of Oracle SuperCluster T5-8 server.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is no doubt that oracle SuperCluster can provide 10x performance than other equivalent  servers since you have everything on the system like storage,high performance Infiniband switches and Exadata storage servers.

Hope you got some idea about oracle’s super Cluster.you can expect many articles on this topics on unixarena.