Oracle adds new Sparc and x86 blades

Oracle has added to its blade server line-up with new Sparc and x86 models aimed at cloud computing and highly virtualised environments, offering greater performance and simplified management, according to the firm.

The new models include the Sparc-based T3-1B blade server and the Sun Blade X6275 M2, a dual-socket server blade based on Intel's Xeon 5600 processors.

Both of these are designed to fit Oracle's Sun Blade 6000 chassis, which allows users to mix and match Sparc and x86 modules up to a total of 10 compute and nine storage blades.

John Fowler, Oracle vice president of systems, said the systems will support new application-to-disk solutions capable of meeting the most challenging cloud requirements of customers.

According to Oracle, the twin-socket Sun Blade X6275 M2 is an ideal choice for virtual environments and cloud infrastructure, as it doubles compute density and improves performance while reducing power consumption.

Each of these blade modules can be fitted with up to 192GB of memory and a choice of 1Gbit/s or 10Gbit/s Ethernet NICs.

Meanwhile, the T3-1B models are based on Oracle's recently introduced 16-core Sparc T3 processors, and boast double the throughput and four times the I/O bandwidth of previous Sparc systems.

These blades support up to 128GB memory and can be fitted with up to four internal 300GB SAS drives.

Both new blade systems are available with Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux or Oracle's VM virtualisation platform based on the Xen hypervisor.