At an earlier-this-week press conference, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced the launch of its latest database-crunching machine called the SPARC Supercluster - Oracle's new enterprise computing system that amalgamates Sun Microsystems' processor architecture with UNIX-based Solaris operating system, and ZFS-based storage technology.

The SPARC as well as Solaris technology has been acquired by Oracle as a result of the Sun takeover.

According to Oracle's claims, the high-performance SPARC Supercluster can process 30 million transactions per minute; which is nearly three-fold speedier than the earlier record performance by IBM's DB2 on a P7 cluster.

To beat IBM's record, the hardware configuration of a single SAPRC Supercluster - which essentially combines some of the best possible technology to really enhance the limits of enterprise systems - features 108 SPARC T3 chips that form a total of 1,728 processor cores.

According to Chicago Independent Press, the SPARC Supercluster's key specifications include 13TB of memory, 246TB of flash storage, and 1.7 petabytes of total storage capacity.

About Oracles' SPARC Supercluster outdoing the IBM system, Ellison said during the course of the recent conference that Oracle has raised the bar with the notable enhancements made to Sun's technology, putting the new system in the lead.

Specifying further, Ellison added that the Supercluster's price-to-performance ratio beats IBM's best by 27 percent; and that Oracle's benchmarks indicate the Supercluster's 66 percent better price/performance ratio as compared to HP.