OpenWorld: Oracle beats the all-in-one drum with T4 servers

Oracle has once again pitched customers on the benefits of its full-stack approach to enterprise server development and management, showcasing the company's new Sparc T4 servers that offer complete high-performance packages.

Highlighting the Sparc line is the T4 Super Cluster system that houses enough power and capacity to run Oracle database and middleware platforms on a single system.

The T4 systems are a symbol of what Oracle believes to be its greatest strength in the market, according to executive vice president John Fowler.

"We can break down barriers and engineer and approach problems differently because we are not constrained by just the layer of technology - because we can roam across all these layers," he said.

The release comes as Oracle looks to revitalise the former Sun server platform. Many in the industry doubted the long-term viability of Sparc after Oracle's purchase of Sun in 2009, and rivals such as IBM and HP began to poach customers from Oracle.

Rick Hetherington, vice president of hardware engineering at Oracle, told reporters at OpenWorld that the company is committed to Sparc and that it will not follow in the footsteps of Itanium.

"Sparc will not become an Itanium. We are investing quite heavily in Sparc. We have an enormous fan base and they are all well prepared for a refresh with T4," he said.

Hetherington added that Oracle will look for further ways to tie Sparc with its software lines to pull the most performance out of the processor line.

"We are exploring ways in the database - what we can pull out of that hardware and accelerate," he said.