SUN Starfire well suited for SAP

Munich 10-10-1996 The former Cray Business Systems presented their new products and software developments under the flag of their new mother SUN in Munich on September 23. The new racehorse will be the Starfire, and it will be targeted to the commercial market.

About 250 staff of the Business Servers moved from Cray to SUN. Wolfgang Kroj is now responsible for German sales. The group now works in a much expanded environment, being integrated within Sun and co-operating with the leading software companies e.g. Informix, Oracle and SAP.

Wolfgang Kroj listed some of the current customers of the former Cray CS 6400. They included 32 processors at Deutsche Telekom (data warehousing, ORACLE), Deutsche Bahn (OLTP database server) and SAP competence centre, 48 processors at SICAN (ECAD). Furthermore the Bundesamt für Seeschiffahrt und Hydrographie and an No Name organisation have installed this machine. The Universities at Magdeburg and Jena use it as a file and archive server.

SUN Starfire

Some rumours are already heard about details of Starfire which will be announced officially beginning next year. It is designed as a fully redundant system with an automatic system recovery.

You can expect a machine with the following features:

64 UltraSPARC processors
64 GByte shared memory
20 TByte online disk
64 S-bus connections
12.5 GB/s internal bandwidth
6.4 GB/s I/O bandwidth

Some of the rumoured specialities of this machine include:

autoreconfigurable
redundant peripherals
arbitrary configuration, I/O versus CPU nodes
binary compatible with the SPARC systems
the system can be divided into logical processor groups
hot swap of system boards
dynamical detach and attach of boards even in software

The new Starfire is expected to be used in commercial applications, for example for SAP and data warehousing, as well as in the scientific world.

SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark and SUN

Manfred Schirra, SAP sales manager at SUN, reported on the new SAP R/3 SD benchmark results. He noted that the hardware is not the bottleneck but architectural limitations in the software cause problems. SUN's installations in this field have actually grown in numbers and users. He defined their market segment by more than 300 users, and he noted that Windows NT is very successful in the lower segment.

He discussed the actual results of the SD benchmark - it simulates the sales and distribution in a company - and underlined that utilisation of the database server with 20 UltraSPARC processors lay in the range of 40%. This means that you get the same results with a 10-processor machine. The software is now the limiting factor.

With the following configuration they simulated 1 800 benchmark users with an average response time of 1.37 seconds that means 570 000 dialogue steps/hour: Database server: Ultra Enterprise 6000, 20 Ultra SPARC processors, 5.6 GB memory, 400 GB SPARCstorage Array Application servers: 8 Ultra Enterprise 4000, 8 UltraSPARC processors, 2 GB memory Central Instance: Ultra Enterprise 4000, 6 UltraSPARC processors, 1.5 GB memory

SUN and Internet

Today, SUN is improving and further developing the SAP Java GUIs. With them it is now possible to attach SAP with Netscape browsers. The SUN people in the competence centre are also certifying the new hardware - Starfire - in close co-operation with SAP.

Hans Gerke from SUN presented Internet success stories in this field, 35% of all Internet servers come from SUN, 75% of all Internet providers use SUN and 80% of all Internet applications are developed on SUN machines. Java, the cafein for the Internet as Gerke called it, is also designed by SUN. Java is not only an object-oriented programming language but also a development environment.

New trends at ORACLE

Erwin Zednik from ORACLE underlined the importance of Internet connectivity too. His company's solution is ORACLE universal, HTML pages are created directly from the database. As an example he showed how a customer goes through the Power Browser and an integrated billing window into the electronic mall. This is managed by an Oracle database system together with another connection via the Internet to the bank to check the credibility of this customer.

News from Informix

Ulrich Press from Informix also pointed to new data types, extending those of relational data base systems, for example EXCEL or WORD documents. The Informix Universal Server will allow complex data as pictures, sound, video, HTML or text documents. It will be allowed to digitise multimedia data and then store them in the data base. He gave hints about the new BP-shops at the filling stations in Germany, where you can have a close look at goods on a screen and order them. These are complex data, stored in the database.

According to Gartner Group the market share of the object-oriented databases will be twice that of of relational in 2000. So both database vendors have recognised the importance of the new technologies in networking, hardware - parallel systems - and object-orientation.

Uwe Harms