Decades of continuous innovation from Sun,
Fujitsu, and Oracle
SPARC—a name derived from scalable processor
architecture—is a reduced instruction set com-
puting (RISC) processor architecture developed
by Sun in 1984. The following are key SPARC
release milestones.
1986: Sun creates the first SPARC processor.
1987: Sun ships the first SPARC workstation using
the SPARC processor.
1992: Sun ships SuperSPARC, the first multiscalar
RISC chip with symmetric multiprocessing.
1995: The UltraSPARC I microprocessor, the first
64-bit microprocessor from Sun, is introduced.
1997: Sun releases the UltraSPARC II, which adds
critical enhancements to boost data bandwidth
and improve floating-point and multimedia
performance.
2001: Sun releases the UltraSPARC III, with
optimized instruction fetch, store bandwidth, and
data prefetching.
2004: Sun ships the first dual-core SPARC
processor, the UltraSPARC IV.
2005: The UltraSPARC IV+ processor ships,
featuring enhanced processor cores and an
on-chip L2 cache.
2005: The multicore and multithreaded
UltraSPARC T1 is released, with an 8-core chip
multithreading system capable of processing as
many as 32 threads concurrently.
2007: Sun releases the UltraSPARC T2 processor.
The first 64-thread processor, the UltraSPARC
T2 boasts the industry’s first massively threaded
“system on a chip” with integrated networking,
integrated PCI Express, and embedded wire-
speed cryptography.
2008: Fujitsu releases the SPARC64 VII, a quad-
core processor featuring two-way simultaneous
multithreading.
2010: Fujitsu announces the SPARC64 VII+,
providing performance improvements over the
SPARC64 VII processor.
2010: Oracle introduces the SPARC T3. The
world’s first 16-core, multithreaded server
processor, the SPARC T3 includes built-in
cryptography, 10 Gb Ethernet, and integrated
Gen 2 PCI Express.
Solaris, and Oracle’s database, middleware, applications, and more
is just getting started.
“Oracle now has the operating system, processor development,
virtualization software, and applications all within one company,
with each unit striving to move the performance ball forward,” points
out Rick Hetherington, vice president of hardware development at
Oracle. “For example, the operating systems will be able to recognize
critical threads in our applications and assign them to a dedicated
processor core to achieve the very highest performance for specific
workloads. This will enable customers to make much more efficient
use of their I T resources.”
While Oracle develops new hardware and software products, Eagle
continues to look for the highest performance
and efficiency from its SPARC-based solu-
tions. “We’ve worked collaboratively with Sun
and Oracle over the years to identify perfor-
mance improvements and to take advantage
of new features when they become available,”
says Taylor.
ROAD-TESTED FOR RELIABILI T Y
Ask Hal Moretto, director of database plat-
forms at SunGard’s Availability Services
division, what keeps him up at night, and the
first thing he will tell you is “high availability.”
Downtime isn’t an option when your
company’s IT infrastructure manages more
than US$25 trillion in investment assets and
processes more than 5 million trades each
day. That’s the processing load that financial
intermediaries turn over to SunGard, one of
the world’s leading software and technology
services companies.
In addition to software and processing
solutions, SunGard provides disaster recovery
services, managed I T services, information
availability consulting services, and business
continuity management software, serving
25,000 customers in 70 countries across virtually all industry and government sectors. As colocation and managed services gain in popularity, SunGard is also expanding into new technologies with cloud
offerings and advanced recovery solutions.
“We do recovery services. We’ll either manage a customer’s
facility or we’ll manage a customer’s equipment or applications
within our managed services centers,” Moretto explains. “If we have
an issue, I want to know if we have a solid backup. Can we restore it?
Are we doing our best from a security standpoint? And how are we
doing performancewise?”
With a focus on supporting SunGard’s internal business systems,
Moretto’s team is responsible for SunGard’s internal Oracle
And Moretto’s team does a lot of product
testing. “We want to be our own best cus-
tomer,” Moretto says. “Several of our own
products are key pieces of the infrastruc-
ture that we rely on and support today.”
The most important of these is SunGard’s
advanced recovery solution, Recoverpoint,
which is set up to replicate data from the
company’s production sites in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, to a new recovery facility in
Carlstadt, New Jersey. As Moretto describes
it, implementing that solution didn’t
happen overnight.
Eagle Investment Systems
eagleinvsys.com
Location: Newton, Massachusetts
Industry: Financial services
Employees: 450
Oracle products and services: Oracle
Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters,
Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle Data Guard,
Oracle VM, Oracle Solaris 10, SPARC64
processor, SPARC T-Series Servers
SNAPSHOTS
SunGard
sungard.com
Location: Wayne, Pennsylvania
Industry: High technology
Employees: 20,000
Revenue: More than US$5 billion
Oracle products: Oracle Database 10g; Oracle
Real Application Clusters; Oracle Application
Server 10g; Oracle WebLogic Server; Oracle
Enterprise Manager; SPARC Enterprise
M5000 servers; Sun SPARC Enterprise
T5440, Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220, and
Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 servers; Oracle
Solaris 10; Oracle VM Server for SPARC; Oracle
Solaris Containers; Oracle E-Business Suite
and Oracle Hyperion applications
VIR TUALLY FAIL-SAFE
When he joined SunGard six years ago,
Moretto explains, the company was already
running its Oracle applications on Sun
SPARC systems. But over the course of 15
