The chest-thumping in the computer systems market continued unabated on Thursday, as Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told attendees at a new product launch that Oracle would win market share from newfound rival HP.
Oracle, which has its roots in the database market, has broadened its offerings to encompass nearly all components of modern computer systems. A relative newcomer to the field of server hardware, which it entered with its January acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle has wasted little time in signaling its market presence.
At the launch event, Oracle unveiled the SPARC Supercluster, which brings together extensive computing systems resources to process transactions that number in the millions per minute. The product is tailored to the new generation of data center, officials said, in which cloud computing and scalable computing loads are the norm.
Ellison said the SPARC Supercluster technology has broken the world record for transaction processing. A specially configured SPARC Supercluster using more than 100 SPARC T3 processors and 13 terabytes of main memory processed 30 million transactions in an Oracle database in one minute, he revealed. The achievement marked the end of a four-month reign by partner and rival IBM, whose cluster of its P7 machines had achieved 10 million transactions per minute. And, according to Ellison, Oracle’s 30-million-transactions-per-minute feat dwarfed rival HP’s high-water mark. HP’s Superdome array managed 4 million database transactions in a minute, he said.