Edition eight of Oracle’s SPARC platform is here

Aiming to deliver new levels of security capabilities and performance for critical customer workloads, Cloud major Oracle has unveiled its eighth-generation SPARC platform that is powered by the new M8 microprocessor.

SPARC M8 processor-based systems are designed to seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructures and include fully integrated virtualisation and management for Private Cloud.

“SPARC was already the fastest, most secure processor in the world for running Oracle Database and Java. SPARC M8 extends that lead even further,” said Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, Oracle, in a statement late on Monday.

The new Oracle systems and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) deliver a modern enterprise platform, enabling customers to cost-effectively deploy critical business applications and scale-out application environments with extreme performance—both on-premises and in Oracle Cloud.

All existing commercial and custom applications will run on SPARC M8 systems unchanged with new levels of performance, security capabilities and availability.

The SPARC M8 processor with Software in Silicon v2 extends the industry’s first “Silicon Secured Memory”, which provides alwayson, hardware-based memory protection for advanced intrusion protection. The SPARC M8 processor offers security enhancements, delivering 2x faster encryption and 2x faster hashing than x86 and 2x faster than SPARC M7 microprocessors. IANS