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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!"
Right at the point when we can get kick ass high end hardware such as Sun's E15k for free... that's when Sun will die. Remember, Sun is still primarily a hardware company.
Man, this is so great to see large corporations backing Linux! Just when i was beginning to think linux was losing the war (Demise of Loki and other players), everyone and thier grandmother is jumping on the bandwagon =) Most people will probably complain about it, but I think that support from large companies will help linux make larger/faster strides =)
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
You are probably right, if longer term means 50 years or so.
Why do people assume that linux must kill everything else? Why wouldn't other OSes evolve as well?
I swear, linux zealots insist that monopolies are wrong and people have choices for the OS they run, but they want linux to be the only choice.
So what they're saying is that they don't really want to pay licensing costs, b.cos, IMHO, linux is the same base architecture as what they have been running for years, i.e. Unix. They are both still fully compliant POSIX os's, right?
and he picked Linux over Microsoft Corp.'s Windows because Linux is "much safer if you're on the Internet." Ellison is a longtime Microsoft foe. Says it all.
Ellison said. "You'll see us taking full support responsibility for Linux," he said. "If you're running the app server and something goes wrong, call us and we'll come and fix it." But not for pr0n caused cache problem's, or hmmm?
said. However, "in a couple of years it's not inconceivable that we could be recommending [Intel-based servers] for everything," Ellison said. "It's not out of the question." just unlikely
now for my one cents worth
how much of this is going to affect linux? most people outside of the corporate IT support dept have nothing to do with oracle, much less know anything about it. I don't see this as causing a gigantic stir, or at least, it wouldn't have, had Oracle not announced it. Maybe it is the more political thing to do, and I am a programmer, not a politician.
sometimes, i think it is better to just stick with the Apple ][e BASIC and design moving lines with the monkey support console
Oh yeah, three servers?
2^3 * 31 * 647
I don't know anyone who would want their production Oracle database on Intel hardware. You can't just keep throwing faster cpus into the same outdated backplane and expect to get the kind of throughput performance that a db requires.
Additionally, who with a production system isn't going to want both the hardware & software reliability and 24/7 support of the caliber that Sun provides?
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux & use it as my primary platform. But I wouldn't deploy my db back-end on it. We used Suns at my last job for very good reasons.
He may take the Sun out of Oracle, but he won't take the Sun out of the users, and if Oracle starts slipping on the Sun support, there's always Sybase.
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
This should also go a long way towards bolstering the impression of Linux in the IT world. If Oracle is running linux, then it must be able to handle mission critical apps (so the agrument would go).
This is a natural move for server (as opposed to host) vendors. Applications like Oracle typically are the only things on the server, or run with only minimal software designed specifically to run with them. (LDAP servers are another example, at least in the corporate space.) By using an existing OS that they can modify as they wish, they can optimize the system for their database, and vice versa. Because the OS is in use elsewhere, there are a number of available tools for administrators to use on their systems. At once, Oracle makes itself independent of large companies like Sun or Microsoft, and can potentially make a better product in the bargain. My guess is, there will be a specific flavor of Linux and specific supported hardware, once Oracle releases this into the marketplace.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Wasn't Ellison the one who put the big push into 'thin clients' as well? I dunno about you guys, but I've got *tons* of those hanging around.
I think there's some typos.
;)
"We'll be on Linux no later than the summer, so we'll be running our whole business on Linux."
I think he meant to say: "We'll be owning Linux no later than the summer, so we'll be running the whole business of Linux." I can't really back that up, unless you take the fact that Larry Ellison said it as proof
Seriously, this would be good for Linux in the big picture. Most of us would stick with our MySQL and PostgreSQL servers, but with Oracle...Enterprise credibility goes up. Additionally, all the industry behemoths (AOL/TW, Oracle) would fare well to bolster Microsoft's competetors.
I might burn some Karma for saying this, but Linux is symbolically a pawn, being used by the giant corporations for leverage against their current giant corporation rivals.
I also wonder how market share affects this. Linux is growing in the server market. Oracle isn't being used in these machines. Which means less money for Ellison. I wonder how this will work out. Any suggestions?
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
Actually, it is licensed to run based on the number of cpu's. RAC (real application clusters) cost an extra 50%. Last I checked, you could download 9i for linux intel (just watch those system requirements very carefully, your favorite distro is most likely not covered)
All of that said, if oracle can get you to get rid of your 72CPU SunFire 15K and replace it with a 128 single cpu intel boxes..... (extra intel boxes to make up for the lost ram and system bandwidth in the 15K)
Lets see what that would cost ya...
list price for a 72 cpu license for a single box is 2.9 million. List price for those 128 cpu's w/ RAC will cost ya 7.6 million.
Lots of smaller, "cheaper" systems can often cost less overall. This is not the case here, where the price delta more than makes up for the cost of the big sun box, and we dont even have to get into the argument over the extra cost involved in managing 128 different systems. (besides, RAC is not a 'shared nothing' cluster, so management of large clusters is a real pain)
anyway, larry is always going to need sun to produce the big boxes for its big clients.
Most Oracle users don't use it for "moderate database requirements". They use it when they simply cannot afford to lose data and/or they need something that you can scale the hell out of. PostgreSQL is nice but will *never* replace Oracle. Sun would look childish to offer PGSQL as a replacement.
...it's a win for Intel. Larry says nothing in the article about the capabilities of Linux except that it's better than Windows "if you're on the Internet."
What he really liked, apparently, was the fact that the hardware was cheap and easily replaceable. It's a win for clustering, certainly, but is it a win for Linux?
As glad as I am to hear that a big company like Oracle is making the move to Linux, I think that without the "core" Linux community remaining vigilant, it could result in problems down the road.
On one hand, having a larger user base is definately a GOOD THING. Proving that Linux can provide the infrastructure for one of the world's top companies is a GOOD THING.
Problems arise in the mid to long term possibilities. Will Sun ultimately lose so much business that they're driven out of the software market? Despite the fact that they seem to be sunsetting, they're still a software/OS player, and the more players in the field, the better the products (my belief is that Linux has achieved so much partly because it had Sun, SGI, Be, MS to prove itself against) all around. Its not like MS can provide Linux with any great technical challenges to overcome...
And am I alone in worrying that having so many big companies like IBM, Oracle, God forbid AOL/TW using Linux may end up with them pushing development away from the needs of the average user? Sorof like getting a loan from the Mafia, you never know when or how you're going to pay up.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
Some of you may disagree with me, but Sun has contriubuted a lot to the OpenSource community. They have programmers working on the Mozilla, GNOME and most especially OpenOffice projects. All of these projects seek to provide highly usable and OpenSource alternatives to Microsoft software, namely, InternetExplorer, Windows and MS Office, respectively. They have (in a highly restricted way) opened up the source code to Java and have offered the JDK and all other Java API's for Linux.
Now, ironically, Linux is eating into Sun's market share, to the delight of OpenSource zealots, who decry Sun simply for being a for-profit corporation. I get the sense that many OpenSourcers are rooting against Sun, and I believe that's an entirely counter-productive position to take.
Microsoft is the enemy of OpenSource, not Sun. Sun may not have open-sourced Java and Solaris, but, hey, they need to make money just like everybody else. Sun has many OpenSource products and has contributed much to the community.
OpenSource and Linux will lose a great deal if Sun goes out of business, and not vice-versa.
This space left intentionally blank.
Intel-based servers may be cheap and all, but I do not look forward to a future where the RISC-based manufacturers, such as Sun, IBM, and SGI, are totally displaced.
Reality is that traditional RISC-based workstations and servers, such as Sun's higher-end Ultra and Blade workstations, are really a joy to work with. They are amazingly robust and flexible, since they typically are the result of long and thorough development and testing efforts. They tend to have useful lifetimes of about a decade, where they keep finding new roles and finally get mothballed after enjoying a last hurrah as a print server. They have genuine firmware, so you don't have to jump through flaming hoops to bootstrap the system they way you want to. Their enclosures are very well engineered for easy maintainence, fewer moving parts, and good airflow. And on and on...
Whenever I see the inside of an Intel-based server, I am a bit disappointed. Working with one tends to be disappointing as well. Truth is: you do get what you pay for.
I hope Oracle doesn't learn too many hard lessons these next few years.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I know it's probably gonna be a while until this actually would happen as big a**(TM) servers are still the way to go for super performance.
This would probably force the big server makers to bring more innovation to the lineups and lowering the price.
So at the end, Linux gains more marketshares, Windows gets even less in the server market and probably lower TOC for those big servers.
kawai
the idea behind the clustering technology is it doesn't have to scale, you can add more boxes into the cluster and thats your scalability. I don't want to go off comparing database technology to something like distributed.net, etc. But, things such as queries are naturally broken down into simple tasks that are easily distributed across multiple machines.
if their cluster solutions works as well as the rest of the their software, it shouldn't be a problem.
Regarding Postgres, your claims are pretty weak. I have been using it for about 4 years and have never 'lost data'. Besides, isn't that what backups are for?
I have had oracle 9iAS running on Linux for a year.
It is very poorly supported by oracle.
I had to do a lot of tweaking, (editing kernel headers, etc)
However, since i got it to work, it has totally outperformed the windows NT implementation.
For one thing, it has uptime of 200+ days.
back in the day, many of our clients *insisted* on using Oracle for the most trivial of applications, like BBSes or a phone-lookup service. They thought that by paying truckloads of cash their apps would be faster or something. Hell, even mySQL and Postgres would be overkill for some applications... The clients would rather pay than think!
I left the industry after clients started using similar glassy-eyed statements about Java. Both Java and Oracle have their place, but considering Oracle's insane price and administration overhead, it needs quite a bit of research before deployment.
Ellison appears to be pitching cheapness and flexibility to his clientele, which is not a philosophy that Oracle software espouses (Linux is cheap and the licensing is flexible). I think that this *is* a win for Linux and Open Source software, but could be a problem for Oracle.
By making this move, Larry will be exposing the high-end companies he courts to commodity technology ideas that they otherwise might not explore. Most of these companies have "more money than sense." Often they view free or open software with disdain for its percieved lack of support, or even for its percieved unAmerican philosophy. But after having their eyes opened in this fashion, they may start developing a keen awareness of how badly Oracle is screwing them.
At the least, Oracle may introduce to these companies a culture of thriftiness, which is probably not in Larry's best interest.
I agree with you partially. Everyone knows Oracle uses Suns. How come "industry leaders" still use NT machines for Oracle if Oracle themselves don't use NT??
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
but really what love does anyone have for larry? i mean Oracle, excuse me? If it wasn't for the fact he hates Bill gates as much as /. does most of you gentle readers would dismiss him as another steve jobs only vastly more crass.
sun are to servers as apple is to the desktop. they both make great hardware, are beloved by their owners, and were founded by pot-smoking-soap-dodging-duck-squeezing-hippies.
but larry's just a jock and everyone knows it. bill's a gug, scott's some sort of spooky intellectual surrounded by his braniac hippie mates. steve's morphed into a gap-ad-proto-beatnik but it's been so gradual that no-one noticed. i challenge you now, go find old photos of yourself. 10 to 1 you can find photos where you are still wearing the same sort of clothes as you do now. with steve this is more like 99:100
but i digress.
so the best news for me out of all this is that oracle runnign on linux means oracle running on osx isn't far behind. larry will want oracle on some fuck off big unix box, and he's still on apple's board. steve will give in to pressure and release a proper rack mountable OSX server bundled with a full oracle developer suite.
but sun will do something new and cool and unexcpected. steve doesn't own the franchise on innovation. in the last few years sun have been innovating hard. java is a triumph, jini and javaspaces are pure genius, who knows, maybe sun will move into consumer electronics? they'd be damn good at it.
my 2c
dave
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Yeah, except anyone that would be paying out the nose for Oracle is willing to pay the money not to have to go through the process of switching to a less secure, less featured and slower database. Also, the reason you pay for Oracle is the same reason people buy Cisco support contracts. If something fucks up, they will fix it immediately, it doesn't matter if it's 3am on a Sunday night, someone who definately knows what they're doing will be there within 15 minutes. You don't get that with PostgreSQL, or any other "free" software.
What I'm saying here is that the many thousands of dollars per month large companies pay for Oracle is worth the absolute assurance that their database will be usable 24/365(6). Sometimes, it's just cheaper to pay the money than lose out on $100,000,000 worth of money transfers during the hour you're down.
This is slightly OT, but I can't find it anywhere else (i.e., Google), so whatever.
The true meaning of Oracle is:
One
Rich
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison
Apparently unlike the majority of the people here, I don't want to see Linux drive everyone else out of the marketplace. Choice is good.
This is something i've been wanting to say for a while, but you said it so i'll just agree. I don't think the Evil Empire of Microsoft has always had a devious plan to take over the universe and push everyone around. It's just that now, they have the power to _be_ evil. It's the same way in any other situation - power corrupts, or, put differently, you _will_ do what you _can_ do. In other words, what you can get away with.
Situation: what happens when linux has 95% of market share? You think that will Utopia? NO! I think it will be distro wars, and binary incompatibility, and Distribution Z running off with its code from Distributions X and Y, legal battles over the licenses cuz that linux kernel+software will be worth BILLIONS if that day comes - whoever controls it controls 95% of computing...you think that'll be fun then?
Sorry if i'm getting too excited - but I think that what is of greatest importance is competition - linux isn't the second coming, as much as you'd like it to be. Free software's ideas are great - but linux is more than an idea - and it can be corrupted and misused and monopolized. Competition is what we need - and part of linux is that it allows competition (with itself, even) through it's openness, yes. Me, I'm looking for competition, not dominance.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
This reminds me of the "A vote for Nader is taking a vote away from Gore" argument the Gore camp was throwing around.
"That dog won't hunt"
A vote for Linux is a vote for Linux. Each and every competitor must stand on it's own merits. If Sun, HP, et al are losing customers, it is because their customers see an advantage in their competitors product. Evolve to meet the demand or die...
Darwinistic Capitalism... mmm mmm... Gotta Luv It!
Is it just me, or is anyone else interested in being able to slap an Oracle based distro install CD in a drive, hitting yes a few times, getting a coffee, coming back and having an oracle server ready for them?
I'm a developer, not a DBA. The companies I have worked at (web development agencies) did not need a DBA. They did development, not support/maintenance. I've been er, lucky enough, to install Oracle 8i on Solaris, Redhat, NT and Win2k. Anyone else who doesn't like the first page of the install notes ("Recompiling the kernel for shared memory semaphores") will know the problems I mean. It's *hard* to install. Give me an ISO that installs right, is secure and runs Oracle right would not only get my firms cash, but it would also help establish Oracle+Linux as a solution.
I think Larry needs to turn some of his Charisma onto this sort of thing personally.
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
It would appear the Solaris on Intel has come to the end of the road. Here is the quote from Sun's website.
However, even if Sun wasn't end-of-lifing Solaris for Intel, there are obvious reasons why Oracle can't base their future business plans on the availability of a low-cost version of Solaris on Intel based hardware. The most obvious of these reasons is that Oracle doesn't own Solaris. If Oracle were to start suggesting to their customers that they run Oracle on free copies of Solaris for Intel (instead of Sun's Sparc hardware) then Sun is bound to notice, and they would almost certainly change the license for their Intel version. After all, they can't really let their free Intel version of Solaris cannabalize sales of their Sparc hardware.
Linux, on the other hand, is safe because Oracle has as much control over it as they need. Since Oracle has access to the source code they can easily customize Linux to their particular needs.
Larry is right, it sucks to be in the operating systems business right now. Especially if you are trying to sell a Unix-like operating system (although Microsoft is feeling the pinch as well). Linux on commodity hardware continues to improve at a remarkable pace, and you can't beat the price.
This article states they will switch to linux, which doesn't necessarily mean Intel PCs.
I'd rather have a IBM Zseries 900, running an open source OS such as Linux then have any sun server.
The reasons for that are:
- IBM Zseries is faster and more scalable then any Sun server
- IBM Zseries can run multiple instances of Linux at once
- Sun's OS Solaris is closed source.