Hello and welcome. I'm David Lawler, Senior Vice President of Systems Product Management here at Oracle. I'm excited to introduce John Fowler, Executive Vice President of Systems, and Juan Loaiza, Senior Vice President of Database Software and Technology, who will announce today Oracle's fastest engineered system. Oracle engineered systems are in production across the globe. In Q4 alone, we sold well over 1,200 systems and over 3,000 during our fiscal year 2013. Engineered systems were designed to let customers focus on what their businesses do best by delivering extreme performance, 24/7 accessibility to business information, and unmatched efficiency. The engineering, integration, pre-testing, and tuning that happens in our labs allows us to deliver a complete system that is optimized and ready to run Oracle Database, Oracle Middleware, and core enterprise applications. Let's now get more detail about Oracle's fastest engineered system from John Fowler. John?
Hey, thank you, David. Oracle's engineered systems are the most exciting story in hardware today, with 45% growth in our most recently reported quarter. It's a breakthrough systems approach. With Oracle's engineered systems, we combine the world's fastest servers, extreme performance and storage, and extremely high performance, low-latency networking. It's more than just these hardware components. We do deep co-engineering on the system software, on the Oracle Database, on middleware to bind these together into a capability that is unmatched in the industry. This acceleration of performance for core Database and middleware allows all applications that are deployed against these platforms to run much more effectively than any other system available in the world today. These obviously include all of Oracle's applications. They include any third-party applications built to run against Database today.
We now have thousands of customers in mission-critical production, in virtually every single vertical in the industry. They take existing applications, and they get absolutely spectacular results. Whether their pursuit is extraordinary performance or extreme efficiency, we see example after example after example of customers having these great results. That's what's driving these double-digit consistent growth rates in engineered systems for Oracle. For SuperCluster T44, our existing product based on Unix and SPARC, we have exactly these kinds of examples across both extraordinary consolidation for efficiency as well as great performance. Here are a few examples. Ativos, a cloud provider doing SAP as well as Oracle applications in a multi-tenant cloud, achieves great consolidation as well as great savings. Liberty Global, a telecommunications company, again, magical consolidation levels and performance.
Finally, China Tobacco, an example of a customer moving from IBM WebSphere and Db2 over to SPARC SuperCluster in order to achieve great results in consolidation and cost savings. Today, we're excited to introduce the follow-on product, the Oracle SuperCluster T58, Oracle's fastest engineered systems. Extreme performance, a huge leap over our previous engineered systems. Our highest efficiency with database compression and low-overhead virtualization, and a design that's made for mission-critical applications with no single point of failure. It's powered by the world's fastest processor, Oracle SPARC T5. We recently benchmarked T58, which is the eight-socket multi-terabyte server, which is used in the Oracle SuperCluster, to be the world's fastest single database server, as measured by TPC-C. These improvements in technology performance are a testament to Oracle's integration with and investment in core technology such as microprocessor engineering.
I'd like to turn it over to Juan Loaiza to talk a bit more about what Oracle SuperCluster T58 is all about.
Thanks, John. I'm going to describe exactly what's in a T58 and why it's such a powerful platform. A SuperCluster T58 has three main components. It has servers, it has storage, and it has networking. For the server component in the SuperCluster, we're using eight-socket T58 systems. These are the fastest systems on the market. Each one of the T58 systems has 2 terabytes of memory, and it has virtualization capabilities that have no overhead. There's two of those in a SuperCluster, and each one is comparable in performance or faster than a IBM Power 780+. That's what we're using for the compute. For the storage, we're using Exadata storage, which is the fastest database storage in the market, which I'll talk more about in a minute, and we're also using a ZFS storage appliance for keeping files and binaries.
Connecting the whole thing together is the world's fastest fabric, which is InfiniBand, which has extremely low latency and extremely high bandwidth. Let me talk a little bit about the Exadata storage that's in a SuperCluster. There's a number of special technologies and optimizations in Exadata storage that make it the fastest and best storage for database. For example, in Exadata storage, we have a lot of processing power, and we have special algorithms that offload data-intensive processing from the compute servers directly into storage, where it can execute on the data as it streams off disk and flash. We've also included in Exadata storage the latest PCIe Flash technology, which is the fastest flash technology in the industry, and a lot of special database algorithms to take advantage of that, including for very low-latency transactions and very high throughput queries.
Also in Exadata storage, we use our new generation of compression technologies called Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression. These compression technologies provide great cost savings and improve performance by compressing data, often by 10 or 15 times. When you put together the servers, the storage, the networking, each of which is the best in class in the industry, you get an extremely powerful system in SPARC SuperCluster.
Thanks, Juan. All the database software and operating system and networking enhancements as well add up to a tremendous capability.
Right.
Thanks. When you put this all together and you have extraordinary database and middleware acceleration, you get tremendous price performance advantages. This is an example using IBM Power 780 and their DS8000 with Flash, where for comparable levels of performance, we can do it with one-tenth the cost. This is done not through brute force of a large-scale system, but by the efficiency of SuperCluster and our ability to integrate the different components and do the system software to get a step function capability to achieve the same level of performance as a conventional architecture. We can do this by consolidating database and applications together on a single system. These systems are so powerful, and the database acceleration and middleware acceleration is so efficient, the customers can commonly combine multiple applications on a single system for tremendous cost savings.
SuperCluster T5-8 extends the capability of the previous generation SuperCluster by making a massive leap in performance. Another key element of our strategy is how we support these products. Since we engineer all of the primary hardware and software elements, we can do unique things as it relates to how we support customers in mission-critical environments. Juan, could you help us with understanding Platinum Services?
Sure, John. Platinum Services is a special support that we offer to our Engineered Systems customers. There's a lot of benefits to Platinum Support. For one thing, you get better support not just for the hardware but also for the software. For example, you get better support for database software and middleware software with Platinum Support. You get faster response times. You get remote monitoring. You also get remote patching by Oracle engineers included in Platinum Support. And really the best part about Platinum Support, there's no extra charge. So you're getting better response time, better support, and remote patching all included in the normal support price for Engineered Systems and for SPARC SuperCluster.
Wow, that's fabulous, Juan. We're able to deliver that because we engineered and tested the entire thing as a product, which is unique in the industry.
That's right. It makes it much easier to support. Also, the support is more effective because our engineers at Oracle, our support engineers, all have these products in-house, so we can reproduce problems directly.
Right. Thank you, Juan. A single integrated system also gives you tremendous deployment savings. In addition to the ability to get great performance, we deliver to you an integrated and already tested whole. We know from customers' stories that they are deploying five times faster than those using conventional disaggregated components. As an example, Grupo Monex, which is a large-scale bank in Latin America, they implemented and went in production in less than one month on mission-critical applications. Their own comparisons, it typically took them up to 10 months to complete projects of deploying mission-critical products. It's also a huge OpEx reduction.
Because we deliver a single integrated set of systems, the maintenance, the monitoring, the patching, the routine day-to-day activities to keep the system running are also dramatically reduced, and this is based on our own surveys of customers that have shown us what this actually takes. One of the examples is a North American international financial institution who is using Supercluster as a deployment platform for FLEXCUBE, which is a banking application, and they report a 3x lower maintenance and tuning effort around deploying using engineered systems as opposed to disaggregated systems and storage. One of the key features of the T58 server that's a part of the Supercluster is we have extremely low overhead for virtualization. This means in addition to having a very, very high-performance server and accelerated database, you don't have the overhead of putting multiple applications on this, chewing up a lot of your effective resources.
As a consequence, we can put many applications on these systems very, very efficiently. Here's an example of a media and entertainment corporation who took Supercluster T4-4, they did a large-scale SAP ERP as well as their business warehouse consolidation that was previously running on a wide range of disparate systems and storage, they were able to just consolidate onto a single system. Not only that, they got huge improvements in performance to boot. As you can imagine, a significant installation reduced to a single rack is quite a spectacular result and owes to the complete technology stack, including virtualization. The Supercluster T5-8 enhancements improvement over the previous generation, Supercluster T4-4, are tremendous. We improved performance up to a factor of 2.5x. We increased the storage capacity, we improved the overall price performance of the system by over 3x.
The many examples that we saw driving Supercluster growth before are now dramatically enhanced by an even greater level of performance as well as efficiency in the engineered systems family of Supercluster T5-8. Finally, I want to thank all of you for joining us. Oracle Supercluster T5-8, it's Oracle's fastest engineered systems. It's here to deliver extreme performance and the highest efficiency and for mission-critical systems. Thank you very much.
Thank you, John. Thank you, Juan. Thank you for joining us today to learn about the new Oracle Supercluster T5-8, the fastest engineered system in our portfolio. Please visit the following websites to learn more about the new Supercluster T5-8 and the entire Oracle