Oracle Enterprise Linux Coming to Sparc

Oracle stepped up its efforts to rebuild Sun's hardware business, announcing a high-performance clustered database system that could turn up the competitive pressure on rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Sparc Supercluster, can include dozens of rack-mount servers based on Oracle's recently released 16-core Sparc T3 processor. The product is for customers who want to deploy a very large, high-performance database on a scale-out Unix cluster.

Oracle will port its Enterprise Linux distribution to Sun's Sparc processor, a move that could help it compete better against IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the high-end server business.

Customers who buy Oracle's x86 servers today can run both Solaris and Oracle Enterprise Linux, but for Oracle's Sparc systems, Solaris is the only supported OS.