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Oracle aims to broaden SPARC's reach via cloud service

Oracle launched its SPARC S7 processor and it'll be offered on Oracle Cloud as a way to handle more workloads.
Written by Larry Dignan, Contributor

Oracle rolled out its SPARC S7 processor in servers, its engineered systems and as a cloud service.

SPARC is the RISC-based processor brought to Oracle in the purchase of Sun Microsystems. The processor has typically been used to run Unix workloads. Oracle offers SPARC in its servers and various engineered systems.

According to Oracle, the SPARC S7 processor is 4.27 GHz with 8 cores and 64 threads. The additions to SPARC S7 are designed to improve security, efficiency and simplify architecture. Oracle added that commercial and custom applications will run on SPARC via its cloud services.

The big takeaway here is that the SPARC platform could broaden its reach offered as a cloud service. SPARC has been a Unix specialist in a server landscape where the growth is in Linux and Windows Server systems.

Oracle said the SPARC platform improvements include security that's built into the silicon with encryption tools. There is also a boot from a trusted repository and zones that prevent unauthorized changes. SPARC will also provide a 10x greater analytics performance compared to its predecessor. In addition, more admin and compliance tasks have been built into the SPARC platform if used in an engineered system.

The company's goal with SPARC is to offer commodity system economics with advanced enterprise features.

Meanwhile, Oracle rolled out an engineered system called the Oracle MiniCluster S7-2 for mid-sized workloads.

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