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Oracle Switching To Linux
Bill Kendrick writes: "This Computerworld story quotes Oracle CEO Larry Ellison as saying 'We'll be on Linux no later than the summer, so we'll be running our whole business on Linux." When asked what this means for Unix vendors like Sun... "It will be several years before the big machine dies, but inevitably the big machine will die.' Ouch!"
Actually, they will probably only support one or two major distributions of Linux, and they will probably subcontract out to the Linux vendor some of the Linux problems.
This actually makes a lot of sense for Oracle. After all, they want you to spend as little on your hardware and operating system as possible. After all, they are selling a database and applications, not Solaris licenses. If they can cut Sun out of the loop that is billions more in potential profits for them. Their solutions become less expensive (and more competitive) without any loss of profit margin.
The fact of the matter is that the operating system is quickly becoming a commodity. In a few years even Microsoft won't be selling their operating system (that's why they are so desperate to move to a service and support type business).
The problem with Oracle licensing is that on Intel its in $ per MHz whereas on Sparc/PARISC/MIPS/etc. it's $ per CPU. This is what makes the 'big iron' competitive with the smaller machines, paying 25$ per Mhz on a dualie 2.2Ghz P4 is more expensive than paying for a 4 CPU license for an E450.
Couple reasons why Sun still will be preferable to off-the-shelf, commodity Linux boxes for many a year (with or without Oracle's blessing) - and how to change it! (Disclaimer, we run Linux on our web and DB boxen and do NOT use Oracle (Sybase ASE in fact) and were burned by Sun in a deal we wanted for some 280's).
Banks and others with lots of cash have traditionally enjoyed the "Let's buy a couple really really big boxes and replicate them everywhere" mindset and I don't think that will change. Clustering is way cool but I am not convinced the TCO is far less to cause large customers to switch their entire mission-critical, multi-billion dollar a day transactional systems to Linux.
They will stay with what works for a long, long time. Why Larry's pronouncement of 'support' is interesting is that Linux is, for the most part, unsupported. Sun has hundreds (if not more) of engineers around the world on standby -- if your E10K goes down at 4AM they probably know about it before you do (since they have all sorts of neat things built in) and are already on the scene. With Linux? Not so much -- but Oracle is going to try and push the fears of 'what if it goes down at 4am!' out of their minds by saying "That's ok, we can fix it!". Linux and Intel need to offer much of the same features - I know Compaq has neat little remote monitoring cards with their servers, something like that which hooks into Linux and is a commodity (like video cards, or RAID cards, etc.) would help a lot.
Yes, there is an inherent 'single point of failure' with big boxes. That is why they 'cluster' (in name only and not a special type of software) by replicating all their data from their master to several slaves. Currently Sun platform usually has MORE than ample room for growth and you buy 3 E15Ks simply to have warm-standby machines in case the first goes down (and you can always use the other two as readers).
From a TCO standpoint it is far easier, faster, and cheaper to replace a single machine (under warrantee) than it is to have 20 small ones go down at night. Yup - you need to have redundant supplies on hand for the 'worst' situation - and if you have 100 Linux boxes in a nice array and an earthquake hits you now have to order 100 new boxes to replace your destroyed ones. Sun can get you a replacement (or replacements) installed and configured long before the first truckload of new PCs arrives.
Further, you have to configure and maintain 100 boxes vs. a small cluster of Sun machines. I haven't had much experience in large-scale clustered Linux systems but I would surmise that making a kernel change on 100 Linux boxes would take more time and $$ than to 3 Sun machines.
Plus, Sun's 64 bit architecture beats the pants off of Intel -- and in a large DB app you NEED that extra I/O (which is why a 220R with 450MHz x 2 CPUs will spank any dual Intel system out there). I have yet to see any head-to-head comparisons of Itanium and UltraSparc III, so perhaps Intel can rip that from Sun someday.
Thanks,
--
Matt
(1) Sun's support is great if you are in the right area. Check with companies in smaller centers to see what kind of support they are getting, and how long it takes to get a good engineer out to resolve any serious issues.
(3) Isn't quite true. The OS is only the foundation, and you rapidly find that you need this particular OS patch for Sybase, another for DB/2, another for Encina, Tuxedo, Websphere, ... If you can find a combination of packages that can agree on patch levels, count yourself lucky! The only advantage Sun has here is a better coordination of patches than standalone Linux.
(4) You have got to be kidding! Sun's CPUs, memory modules, and hard drives fail at least as often as other vendors. Personal experience would indicate IBM and HP as the most reliable, but I have no empirical evidence to support that observation.
Your point on price not being relevant is largely true. The cost of the physical hardware is trivial compared to maintenance staff, software licenses, development costs, and cascading downtime.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
These comments I could see in this article are the most stupid uninformed balast I've seen in a long time. Maybe its this way for all articles, but I know my ground here and can judge this.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.