Technology performance depends on “the stack”—all layers of a computer system’s hardware and software working very closely together for speed and efficiency. That’s always been true in the data center, and now it’s every bit as important in the cloud.
Oracle is unique among cloud providers Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com in developing its own microprocessor—the foundation of the technology stack. Oracle’s newest designed-for-the-cloud chip, the SPARC S7, features advanced encryption and memory protection for greater security and reliability in the cloud. SPARC S7 was introduced in June, a few months after the launch of the closely related SPARC M7.
In this interview, John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle, explains how the SPARC S7 can bring efficiency and security to the cloud—and why Oracle continues to remain close partners with Intel even while investing intensively in its own chip technology.
John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle, says the company's new SPARC S7 chip is designed for security and performance. (Source: Oracle)
Q: How is Oracle's new SPARC S7 different from the SPARC M7?
Fowler: The SPARC M7 had breakthrough technology. What we were trying to do was really improve security with Silicon Secured Memory and encryption, and greatly improve the efficiency of analytics applications by putting some logic in the processor design that helped with analyzing and scanning data. We think that's really the next 10 years of processor evolution. It's not just cores and performance, but putting in more specific features to help software.
What we decided to do in the SPARC S7 is take those same core technologies and bring them to horizontal scale and highly scale-out price points. So it's that same technology brought to a different class of platform.
- Related: Oracle SPARC servers
Q. Why does Oracle, a cloud company, continue to invest in creating the world's most advanced microprocessors?
Fowler: We are working to build the world's best infrastructure for customers, and we want them to be able to use x86 and also RISC microprocessors. In the case of SPARC, we're able to put in unique features based on our understanding of software. So for example, we've incorporated security features and integrated data-analytics acceleration.
One of the things we can do as a company is we can take advantage of the volume economics of Intel, use that to build hardware and software products, and then we can do unique differentiation at the processor level.
Q: How does Oracle remain such a good partner with Intel?
Fowler: We partner with Intel to make all of our software work and build a full family of hardware products around Intel. We also work intensively on our own microprocessor to add innovations that wouldn't necessarily be in Intel's interest or capabilities, so we can offer customers the best possible choice in either architecture. It's not either/or. It's really an and strategy. The x86 and SPARC give customers choice.
Q: At the SPARC S7 launch, you emphasized three themes: security, efficiency, and simplicity. Why those three things?
Fowler: Cloud computing exacerbates many of the technical challenges people have in enterprise computing. By its very nature, you're sharing resources, so security becomes even more important. The second thing is, since you're sharing resources and infrastructure, you want to be as efficient as possible because that's a basic cost equation. And finally, what people expect of the cloud is the ability to rapidly provision new services and go compete by moving quickly.
What we try to do is, at every layer of the technology stack—whether it's the microprocessor, the operating system, virtualization, the database, and so on—is go after those three things. The S7 is what puts those things together.
Q: How do the new SPARC processors make these environments more secure?
Fowler: We built in a very wide capability of encryption into the chip, but more importantly, we built in dedicated processor resources to handle encryption. What this means is your application can run at virtually the same performance encrypted as unencrypted. We publish benchmarks where we set world records where the difference between having it turned on and off is less than 2%. So that's the first thing—very capable encryption and very high performance so you don't have a penalty for turning it on.
The second big area we worked on was protecting memory. A lot of people don't realize it, but an application can access any memory it's entitled to. We added a technical capability so an application can't do that unless it has a matching key for all types of memory. This eliminates a lot of program errors automatically.
Q: What are the benefits of using the new SPARC processors in Oracle's own cloud environment?
Fowler: We deploy both x86 and SPARC in our cloud. Customers can choose to use SPARC, and what they gain as advantages are advanced security—the encryption and memory protection—as well as very high performance and efficiency per core.
We expect customers, over the next decade, to be making choices between products to use in on-premises computing and cloud computing. We want them to use both SPARC and Intel, and we're the only company that spans those two worlds.
Q: Oracle also recently released a SPARC-based Oracle Compute Cloud service. How is it different from other cloud infrastructure services?
Fowler: It's different because it offers SPARC. From Oracle, you can get both x86 and SPARC infrastructure as a service. They're priced identically. We expect to see customers that are interested in higher levels of mission-critical security or doing data-analytics type applications, because that is where SPARC is differentiated.
Q: One of the technologies built into SPARC is the Data Analytics Accelerator, or DAX, which provides more power for data intensive operations. How does DAX work?
Fowler: The Data Analytics Accelerator is able to scan very large amounts of data for strings and filter and decompress data from memory, and it does it at an enormous rate. The software support for this is integrated into Oracle Database 12c today. We’ve opened up the programming interface and created a developer community around this.
I'm really excited about it because analytics today is one of the hottest topics in computing, but it's also one of the most difficult things to do from a performance standpoint.
Q: What about the need for interoperability between on-premises and public cloud. How is SPARC positioned to help with that?
Fowler: We believe the next decade is about enterprises making choices between using cloud services, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, and on-premises computing. There’s no magic day where people just wake up and it's all suddenly in the cloud.
We’re the only company that bridges those worlds. We’ve linked the management tools and the provisioning tools so that if you want to straddle these worlds—move workloads back and forth—you can.
Until now, cloud computing has generally been x86-only. We now offer both x86 and SPARC. And we’re not going to force you to choose cloud or on premises. We built all the technology for both sides, and everywhere in between. That’s a very important thing because that's the practical reality of the next decade.
