E-book

Oracle’s SPARC Systems: What Customers Say

oracle optimized Servers

Engineered for the Enterprise

Contents2

Chapter 1 sparC and solaris – the Future oF enterprise it

Chapter 2 extreme perFormanCe

Chapter 3 mission-CritiCal reliability

Chapter 4 unmatChed seCurity

Chapter 5 no-Cost Virtualization

Chapter 6 total integration

Chapter 7 resourCes

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Facing growing business demands with shrinking budgets is a difficult challenge for many data centers. But with Oracle’s SPARC server family, organizations across the world are reducing data center costs and complexity, streamlining IT management, maximizing system utilization, and delivering the high performance that powers innovation.

Chapter one sparC and solaris – the Future oF enterprise it

“Introducing Oracle Solaris 11, the first OS for the cloud.”

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Oracle’s SPARC servers running Oracle Solaris, as well as the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 and Oracle Optimized Solutions, are engineered to deliver optimum performance across all application tiers, providing an unequalled range of benefits, including:

• Extreme performance: Oracle’s SPARC servers continue to set world records for dozens of performance benchmarks, consistently beating alternative systems

• Mission-critical reliability: Near-zero downtime and simplified systems management provide unmatched reliability and availability at the lowest total cost of ownership

• Unmatched security: Only Oracle’s SPARC servers feature on-chip cryptographic acceleration and the advanced security capabilities of Oracle Solaris

• No-cost virtualization: With virtualization capabilities built into every server and the Oracle Solaris operating system at no additional cost, creating an efficient, flexible data center has never been simpler or more affordable

• Total integration: Oracle’s unique ability to integrate and optimize across the IT stack offers breakthrough levels of performance, efficiency and scalability

“By using SPARC M-Series servers we get higher

performance with a lower footprint. Less energy, more power – it just makes sense.”

Robert Yanckello, Chief Technology Officer, University of Central Florida

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Chapter one sparC and solaris – the Future oF enterprise it

But this is just the beginning – the future for SPARC looks even brighter. Oracle’s roadmap for the SPARC/Oracle Solaris platform outlines a clear commitment to continuous performance improvements. And with the Oracle Solaris 100% binary compatibility guarantee, customers can benefit from future hardware and OS improvements without having to make any changes to applications.

That’s why thousands of customers worldwide know they can rely on Oracle’s SPARC servers and the Oracle Solaris operating system to deliver the performance they need.

Take the example of Frimesa Cooperativa Central, one of Brazil’s largest food production companies. When Frimesa consolidated 20 old machines onto just two Oracle SPARC T-Series servers running Oracle Solaris, the company reduced its data center energy costs by 70%, allowing it to support rapid business growth and expansion into new markets with a high-performance IT environment, while dramatically lowering data center space and power overheads.

For 25 years, SPARC has been at the heart of IT innovation, setting performance benchmarks, and providing affordable best-in-class solutions that have transformed the landscape of enterprise IT. Together with the oracle Solaris operating system –celebrating its 20th anniversary last year - SPARC technologies have been helping organizations meet their strategic goals and build competitive advantage for the best part of a quarter of a century

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At the University of Central Florida, rapid growth was also becoming an issue. With over 56,000 students and 225 degree courses, providing reliable systems access to students, faculty and staff at peak times was a tough challenge – especially on shrinking budgets.

Chief Technology Officer Robert Yanckello explains why Oracle’s SPARC servers were an obvious choice: “The reason we chose SPARC servers is because the technology is able to keep pace with us at the university. They are able to provide the performance and technology we need to deliver the application performance we expect,” he says. “We expect to be with Oracle for a long time. We’re going to work together with them down a path that helps us become more efficient and more effective.”

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Chapter two extreme perFormanCe

Record-breaking, market-leading, world-beating whichever way you look at it, Oracle’s SPARC systems are setting performance standards that the rest of the industry simply can’t match.

• The SPARC T5 processor delivers 2.3x the single‑threaded performance of its predecessor

• SPARC Enterprise M-Series servers provide mainframe-class performance at open systems prices

• The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 runs Oracle and Java twice as fast as IBM’s fastest computer

By driving productivity and empowering users with reliable applications, the extreme performance of Oracle’s SPARC systems is changing the way that customers across industry sectors and geographies manage their organizations.

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“Swisscom hosts one of the largest banking infrastructure in Switzerland and has a big demand for fast and reliable systems. Within the context of a Proof of Concept, we were able to test the SPARC T5 server together with Oracle Enterprise Database 11gR2. The results convinced us the T5 proved to be about 2x faster than our current environment, running on SPARC M8000. Particularly its power to handle heavy load was really astonishing. Together with our customer we decided to migrate the current platform to SPARC T5 systems. Beside the performance boost our customer can benefit from an improved price/performance ratio.”

Stefan Mühlebach, Chief Engineer, Finnova Core-Systems

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Case studyrelianCe big entertainmentWhat customers say

Reliance BIG Entertainment (RBEL) operates more than 20 media businesses, including India’s largest cinema chain, a film production company, and an FM radio network that reaches 41.6 million Indians every week. As the company expanded rapidly, its legacy servers were struggling to cope with the increase in ERP transactions—impeding productivity and efficiency. So RBEL turned to Oracle to provide a high-performance solution that could scale easily to accommodate future growth.

“We evaluated Oracle and other vendors, but the SPARC T4 servers running Oracle Solaris clearly demonstrated better response times,” says T.S. Purushothman, the company’s CIO. “We significantly increased the performance and storage capacity of our ERP application, improving transaction responses by 80% and data backup times by 70%.”

Chapter two extreme perFormanCe10

Case study QualCommWhat customers say

When Qualcomm, a global telecommunications company, was looking to consolidate its applications, it selected Oracle’s SPARC servers to deliver the levels of performance it required.

The company saw a 400% performance increase from Oracle’s SPARC T4 systems, as Matthew Clarke, Senior Director of IT, explains: “The SPARC T4 platform is a huge part of our virtualization effort, and we’re very impressed with the performance capabilities it has shown. Whenever we need an application to be highly reliable, we run it on Oracle Solaris and the SPARC T4 platform.”

“Being able to install an OS in 15 minutes, is

pretty impressive.”

Matthew Clarke,Senior Director IT, Qualcomm

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Keeping downtime to an absolute minimum is critical for effective IT services. Oracle’s SPARC servers provide the highest levels of application availability, rapid fault recovery, and the ability to scale seamlessly without impacting mission-critical applications.

Oracle’s SPARC T-Series and M-Series servers deliver best-in-class reliability by allowing organizations to:

• Simplify administration with hot-swappable components

• Minimize downtime with built-in redundancy and remote management tools

• Prevent faults before they occur with predictive self-healing capabilities

Chapter three mission-CritiCal reliability12

“A major financial services institution serving public health and social services customers, Bank für Sozialwirtschaft AG requires high performance, highly reliable infrastructure to serve its customers,” said Thomas Beneke, SAP IT Manager, Bank für Sozialwirtschaft AG. “We selected Oracle’s SPARC T5 servers running Oracle Solaris 11 to support our SAP R3 deployment based on expected higher performance, and scale which will enable us to handle additional workloads and improve response times for our organization with virtually no changes to our SAP architecture.”

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Case studyisrael disCount banK

What customers say

At Israel Discount Bank, the third largest banking organization in Israel, the reliability of Oracle’s SPARC servers has had an enormous impact on the business. “Since implementing Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers, customer service has improved greatly,” says Jacob Welber, Head of IT Infrastructure at the bank. “We have launched more than 10 critical systems on the servers, including our Basel II solution, with no detrimental impact on internal or external customers.”

Oracle’s SPARC servers have eliminated weekly system outages, vastly improving the internet banking experience for the bank’s customers. Routine maintenance tasks can now be conducted without shutting down the internet banking system, simply by switching all processes to a single server. These new levels of reliability are also helping Israel Discount Bank to ensure a more structured approach to capacity planning than was possible with its previous systems.

Chapter three mission-CritiCal reliability14

Case studythe uniVersity oF ChiCago mediCal Center

What customers say

For healthcare providers, system reliability really is a matter of life and death. When the University of Chicago Medical Center was looking for a reliable system to deliver access to patient care information for more than 6,000 clinical staff, it selected Oracle’s SPARC servers running Oracle Solaris.

“Oracle’s SPARC servers provide us with a secure and reliable platform to run our mission-critical patient care applications and the ability to easily scale to accommodate future growth,” explains Michael Sorensen, Executive Director and Chief Technology Officer, IT Services, at the University of Chicago Medical Center. “The new platform has delivered dramatic results, including significantly faster response times, which is instrumental in our ability to provide patients with the best care.”

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Chapter Four unmatChed seCurity16

While performance and reliability are crucial, enterprises also need high levels of security to protect critical data and services. Oracle’s complete range of SPARC systems provides the security that organizations need to ensure they can benefit from extreme performance and unequalled reliability while minimizing risks.

Oracle’s SPARC systems have many advanced security features built in, including:

• High security with no performance penalty with on-chip cryptographic acceleration supporting 16 industry standard ciphers on Oracle’s SPARC T5 and T4 servers

• Simplified security management with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center

• Cloud security engineered at every level with Oracle Solaris 11 – the first OS for the cloud

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Case studyteChnisChen uniVersität münChen

What customers say

Secure access to critical data is driving better patient care at a German hospital, Klinikum rechts der Isar der Technischen Universität München, where the combination of secure data management and access control from Oracle’s SPARC M-Series servers working with Sun Ray clients has guaranteed a high level of protection for patient information. “Multiple users can now share a single workstation without hesitation and we are secure in the knowledge that sensitive patient data is well protected,” says Dr Manfred Härdtner, Deputy Data Center Manager at the hospital.

Chapter Four unmatChed seCurity18

Case studysungshin women’s uniVersity

What customers say

At Sungshin Women’s University in the Republic of Korea, Oracle’s SPARC servers integrate with Oracle’s advanced database security solutions and Oracle Enterprise Manager to enable rapid data encryption with no effect on database and system performance. “During our Oracle proof-of-concept, we applied tough testing scenarios and the results exceeded our expectations. From an IT perspective, the greatest benefit is that we don’t have to go through trial and error – the solutions just work,” says Lee Seungwon, Manager of the university’s Computer Information Operation Team.

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Chapter FiVe no-Cost Virtualization

Server and application consolidation should be the ideal way to increase systems performance and flexibility while reducing costs. But with so many vendors charging extra for virtualization, it’s no wonder that customers choose Oracle’s SPARC systems, with powerful virtualization capabilities built into every machine and the Oracle Solaris operating system.

With built-in virtualization at no additional cost, Oracle’s SPARC systems provide the perfect platform for consolidating mission-critical environments as well as for public, private or hybrid cloud deployments.

• Simplify consolidation by running existing applications on any version of Solaris on the same machine with Oracle Solaris Zones

• Improve system utilization by eliminating downtime and scaling effortlessly to meet demand with Oracle VM Server for SPARC

• Reduce data center costs by consolidating onto fewer, more efficient servers, reducing space, power and cooling expenses

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Ronan Dunne,Manager, Global Unix/Linux Team

National Instruments Corporation achieved

dramatic energy, space and support cost savings with Oracle’s SPARC servers

Case studynational instruments Corporation

What customers say

When National Instruments Corporation, a leading producer of engineering and scientific tools, wanted to shrink its technology footprint to increase efficiency across the enterprise, it chose to migrate to Oracle’s SPARC servers and Oracle Solaris. By taking advantage of the built-in virtualization of the SPARC/Solaris platform, the company not only reduced its data center footprint and power usage by 60%, it reduced hardware and software support costs by 74% too.

Built-in, no cost virtualization provides the flexibility and scalability the company requires to adapt quickly to changing business needs, as Ronan Dunne, Manager of the company’s Global Unix/Linux Team, explains: “The reliability and scalability of SPARC is extremely important to our business,” he says. “We have a high degree of faith in Oracle Solaris and the SPARC Enterprise servers. Oracle hardware and the Oracle Solaris operating system are very solid and robust. The level of uptime that we get on our hardware is great.”

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Chapter FiVe no-Cost Virtualization

Case studybharat petroleum Corporation limited

What customers say

At Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited, an oil refining and marketing company based in Mumbai, India, Oracle Solaris containers have been used to increase system utilization from 30-45% up to 90-100%, while cutting hardware costs by US$98,000. The seamless scalability and huge performance improvements offered by Oracle’s SPARC M-Series servers running Oracle Database 11g on Oracle Solaris, means the company can support growth in a customer loyalty program that helps it deliver a real competitive advantage.

“We add 40,000 new customers to our loyalty program each year and the amount of data we must process increases each day,” says Ajay Nigam, Senior Manager, IT, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited. “The combination of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 on SPARC servers ensures we can accommodate business growth with ease.

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What customers say

BMC Software, a leading provider of business service management software, has adopted a “virtualization first” approach in its IT organization. Oracle’s built-in, no cost virtualization technology gives the company the flexibility to deploy new system images in an hour or less, while reducing its data center footprint and driving down power and cooling costs.

“Oracle’s SPARC T-Series servers are a mainstay in our data centers, supporting our R&D efforts with virtualized high density compute that enables us to quickly respond to requests for new resources and keep costs down,” says Steve Carl, Senior Technologist at BMC Software. “The powerful combination of Oracle hardware and software not only enables us to reach our aggressive energy reduction goals, but it also will allow us to expand our core center of innovation – our R&D department.”

Case studybmC soFtware

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Chapter six total integration

Only Oracle innovates at every layer of the enterprise IT stack, across hardware, middleware and software, to offer single-vendor solutions that are completely integrated and engineered from the ground up to work together seamlessly – optimizing performance from applications to disk.

Take the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, for example. The world’s first general purpose engineered system, it combines the computing power of the SPARC T4 processor, the performance and scalability of Oracle Solaris 11, the optimized database performance of Oracle Exadata storage, and the accelerated middleware processing of the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud – all in a single machine. Everything is set up and ready to deliver extreme performance from day one, with no need for complex and resource-intensive tuning or configuration.

Oracle Optimized Solutions also take advantage of Oracle’s unique approach to IT integration, delivering a complete package of servers, storage, networking components, operating system, database, and middleware, all designed to maximize the performance of specific Oracle applications.

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The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants is planning

for the future with Oracle Optimized Soloutions.

Marion Wilson,Solutions Architect & Design Group Manager

Case studyaCCa

What customers say

When the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), the global professional body for accountants, was looking for a high availability system that would also reduce its data center footprint and support costs, it chose the Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database.

“What makes me excited about the Oracle optimized technology is that we are able to move ahead with offering new products to customers,” says Marion Wilson, Solution Architect and Design Group Manager at ACCA. “We spend less time worrying about the maintenance of the underlying technology and focus on delivering the business benefit.”

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Chapter six total integration

Case studyigloo produCts CorporationWhat customers say

At Igloo Products Corporation, the world’s #1 cooler manufacturing company, the seasonal spikes in demand for its products are pretty dramatic. The tight integration of Oracle’s SPARC servers and Oracle software gives the company a real advantage when it comes to flexibility and scalability.

“The major benefit that we have gained from using Oracle hardware and software is that we are able to run our entire manufacturing and distribution business with a very lean IT staff and with minimal hardware,” says Aby Joy, Senior Director of IT at Igloo Products Corporation. “The fact that Oracle has a complete applications-to-disk solution helps Igloo a great deal because everything is architected to work together.”

Aby Joy,Senior Director IT, Igloo Productions Corporation

“We compared SPARC to HP and IBM, and for the same amount

of power, the same amount of capacity and scalability, we would have had to pay around

three times more”

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Case studythe oraCle story

Oracle believes in running Oracle on Oracle, and one example illustrates just how strong this belief is.

When Oracle acquired Sun, it needed to integrate Sun’s IT systems and nearly 30,000 Sun employees into Oracle’s IT systems as quickly as possible. Oracle needed to rapidly scale its data center to support the vastly increased demands for its core business applications, as well as integrate IT resources from the acquisition.

“We needed to take Oracle’s existing infrastructure and add 150% capacity to it to support the additional 30,000 employees,” says Chris Armes, vice president of engineering at Oracle. “And we didn’t have a lot of time.”

By consolidating its existing SPARC infrastructure from four Sun servers to two SPARC Enterprise M-Series servers running Oracle Solaris in just two months, Oracle was able to realize more than US$50,000 in yearly savings on facilities costs alone. At the same time, overall performance increased two times for mission-critical processes, and disaster recovery time was cut by 95%.

“It was a huge migration, but we did it all in less than eight weeks with only 16 people,” says Armes. “And the reason we could do it in eight weeks is because the whole stack, from the CPUs up to the applications, is engineered to work together.”

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Case studiesVideos

University of Chicago Medical Center Runs Critical Patient Applications on oracle’s Sun SPARC Enterprise Servers and oracle Solaris

National Instruments Corporation Uses Virtualized Server Environment to Improve System Performance, Reduce Costs, and React More Quickly to business Needs

Carozzi S.A. Updates Server Infrastructure, Accelerates Data Uploads by 300%

bharat Petroleum Cuts Reporting from 2.5 Hours to 35 Minutes, Saves Almost US$100,000 in Hardware

SunGard Data Systems, Inc. Supports Critical Systems with Reliable Servers and Databases

Reliance bIG Entertainment Speeds ERP Transactions by 80%, Cuts backup Time by 70%

University of Central Florida Leverages the oracle Stack

Qualcomm Sees 400% Performance Gain from SPARC T4 Processors

ACCA Plans for the Future with oracle optimized Solutions

Igloo Relies on SPARC’s Scalability for Peak order Times

National Instruments Relies on SPARC to Reduce Costs

SPARC and Solaris Deliver High Performance for IQNavigator

banorte – Large Financial Institution in Mexico and happy M9000 customer

resourCes28

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Further inFormation

SPARC Servers

oracle Solaris

SPARC Enterprise M-Series

SPARC SuperCluster T4-4

SPARC T-Series

Sun blade Systems

Sun x86 Servers

Sun Netra Carrier-Grade Servers

oracle Virtual Networking

oracle optimized Solutions

Jessops Significantly Improves Reliability, Scalability, and Manageability of online Retail operations

Israel Discount bank Improves Customer Service with Fast, Robust, and Reliable Servers

bMC Software Leverages SPARC Servers for Virtualization, Energy Efficiency

banorte Achieves 99.9% Availability for online Financial Services by Consolidating Servers

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