X86 servers are clusters. SPARC are single SMP servers.
The reason to buy oracle/sparc instead of several cheap x86 servers is simple. There are workloads (typically business workloads or databases) that can not run fast on a cluster. You need a large SMP server with as many as 16 or even 32 sockets. In fact there have never existed a larger Linux server than 8 sockets (standard IBM/hp/oracle servers). I invite anyone to post links to a Linux server with more than 8 sockets. And unix servers such as IBM p795 with Linux tucked on top, does not count. It is a unix server, not a Linux server. Besides, Linux scales awful beyond 8 sockets, google big tux. It is a hp unix server with 40% CPU utilization running Linux! under full load.
All large Linux servers with 10.000s of cores, such as SGI altix or UV2000 servers or ScaleMP servers, are clusters. And are exclusively used for HPC number crunching workloads, serving one scientist. In contrast, tightly coupled SMP servers such as huge Unix servers with 32 sockets or IBM mainframes, typically run business workloads serving thousands of users.
Clusters run number crunching for loops in separate nodes with bad latency to nodes far away, you can not run monolithic software, all code is embarrassingly parallel. In SMP servers you run code that branches everywhere with good latency to other CPUs, such as business or database workloads. No one use distributed databases for large workloads, it is too difficult to synchronize data between all nodes. It is much cheaper to buy a huge 32socket unix server.
In fact, SGI and ScaleMP both say their servers are not used for business SMP workloads, and instead only are used for HPC number crunching, I have links where they say that.
Oracle will release the spare m7 CPU with 32 cores, this year which is at least twice as fast than the fastest x86 CPU, and power8 (probably much faster than so). One CPU can do 120GB/sec SQL queries (no typo, x86 and power8 can do... 5gb/sec queries?). It is also immune to the heart bleed bug and others, because of unique security functions. The m7 server will have 32 sockets, 64TB ram and 8.192 threads. It will crush everything. SAP talks about HANA their distributed clustered ram database, but you need a single SMP server for true database performance. With compression you can run very large databases from memory in the sparc M7 server. Wicked fast. A cluster with x86 stands no chance.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
