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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.
Oracle Corp. is about to replace three Unix servers that run the bulk of its business applications with a cluster of Intel Corp. servers running Linux, Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison said yesterday.
I think we can chalk this up as a win.
GO LINUX!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
This is kind of interesting... I just looked at their web page today, and Oracle 9i is licensed to run on different flavors of Unix, but no where listed did it say it was licensed to run on Linux. I wonder if they'll be changing that soon?
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
It'll be interesting to see if more /.ers will support Lary's nat'l ID system if its run off a linux based system, ne?
Sleep is for the weak!
Who says linunx can't run on Sun systems? I've had a production sparc linux distro running successfully for over a year now. I'm not sure I'd want to pay for Oracle, as MySQL is still happy with life, but I doubt that my Sparc servers will be EOL'd any time soon.
-- Hi! I'm a
Point being, Larry Ellison has a tendency to make sweeping pronouncements of that nature, as with the "Network Computer". Maybe they come true, maybe they don't. But if Larry's next payment to Russia for his newest MiG comes due and he doesn't have the cash, he just changes the pricing structure on the Oracle RDBMS to get a few more cents per transaction, since that's where the real money is.
sPh
exactly. this will happen at the same time as they throw away all their desktops and install network computers as per Larry's last brilliant idea. not that network computers aren't a good idea, but because Mr. Ellison says 'this is a good idea' doesn't mean a whole industry instantly realligns itself.. He can't even get the DB industry to do that anymore.
at least their application ware, or am I wrong? Wasn't it Oracle's plan to create an application system that runs native on the hardware without any OS? I thought they finished that with 9i, but again, correct me if I'm wrong. If I'm not, yapping that the company will totally run on Linux is a bit odd then.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Could this be the beginning of a new era? Oracle is one of those companies that although the bulk of the nation's populace ignores (or doesn't even know about), no one can deny their importance or influence. With the new National Security crap going on, Oracle is offering the software for it. Hurrah.
Microsoft: Bajillion
Linux: 1
hey, it's a start.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
...for the moment.
Of course, Tom Ridge could still make it happen as a Homeland Insecurity measure.
Here's a fun game to play w/
Hmmm, gonna be pulling some late nighters there. I'll give him that its good talk. But I bet this is one case where the "sales" department hasn't told the support department their pitch yet.
"YOU TOLD THE CUSTOMERS WE'D DO WHAT?"
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
(refering to Sun) "I think it's going to be really hard for an open standards company like that to get deep into the software business". So Linux yes, open source not so much...
nuff said.
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!
This helps Linux's credibility leading to a stronger position in the marketplace, leading to more apps for Linux which leads to more users and on on.
I stole this Sig
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.
I can't imagine how Sun will handle losing Oracle. The server market seems to be moving to an open-source, "free" platform that more or less removes the OS from the cost equation. Perhaps Sun could do well as a hardware + OS support company and release Solaris "freely"? Sun Linux?
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
Unforturnately for Larry, the same quote is being said to him by the Free Software movement....
www.eFax.com are spammers
...to hear the purveyor's of insanely expensive commercial software boasting about how they're switching from expensive commercial software to free software?
Perhaps Sun should announce their commitment to PostgreSQL.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
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
Not sure what to think of this, honestly.
Sure, Linux is great, I love it. That's not the problem.
The hardware aspect of this just doesn't sound that great to me. Replacing three high end SPARC boxes with a cluster of Intel hardware might not be the greatest idea in the world. Secondary costs could easily skyrocket. I guess only time will tell...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Oracle may be moving their backoffice to Linux but what about the database software itself? It is still a closed source proprietary application.
I want to know when they will be announcing that Oracle is Open Source!
~.Evanrude
I'm sure this is just wishful thinking, but having just gone through the absolutely painful process of getting Oracle to run on RedHat linux, perhaps this move will eliminate the need to use a certain version of a certain distrobution to make it run. *shrugs*
Josh Woodward
.. i wish he would stop dancing around topics all the time, and just be blunt for once...
... if it comes to a Scott vs Larry flamefest, I wouldn't know who to root for :-)
Let's just hope that he doesn't do something along the same lines that he did with the oracle version he said was "unbreakable" with the new Linux system. Granted, it would most likely be a config problem on their part, it wouldn't be very good for them to try and pass it off as a "Linux problem" if something goes wrong.
My other sig is an import.
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?
Great... first replace all the proprietary operating systems with open source systems like Linux and FreeBSD. Run your ultra-expensive Oracle on that.
Then replace the proprietary Oracle with open source systems like Postgres and MySQL.
Now we're talking!
by betting the world a million dollars.
Then I could run Oracle on FreeBSD on Sparc hardware when the port gets finished.
*drools*
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).
Dirk
I agree with your points, but if Oracle Corp actually does move their business systems off Sun and onto a Lintel cluster then it's news no matter if Ellison is a dork or not.
Hell, it's news for him to even announce that they are going to try.
So there you are, some Big Company, with this nifty Linux cluster running Oracle, saving money on the OS and servers, but being bled white by Oracle's per-transaction fee structure.
And then somebody discovers this "PostgresSQL" thing....
Payback's a bitch, innit?
DG
http://autocross.dsm.org/books.html
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
They will have to support only some standard distributions of Linux, with no modifications or modifications limited to their "supported" subset they will create.
Otherwise, it will be too big of a hassle figuring out where the problem lies with a custom distribution. This is not really that good of a thing for either Oracle or Linux... because either Oracle will have to have their own distribution, which you can not alter if you want to keep support, or you will have to go with a RedHat, Debian, Mandrake or some other flavor and keep it to their specs...
Interesting to see how this turns out....
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.
And when Larry has trouble and he has no one to yell at, it will be I'm sorry Sun please let me back in. Scott's eyes will turn to dollars signs and say sure.
The article leads me to believe they haven't even started the migration of these three servers that supposedly run the bulk of their business.
Oracle, to the best of my knowledge, does one hell of a lot of business.
Summer? Certainly not of this year...
What does Ellison see in Linux? *puts on his flame-retardant suit for this one*, for the businesses he supports (gotta give him credit folks #1 database co here, and not overnight) what does he see in Linux's future that Solaris can't match or beat already?
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
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
Maybe you should read the article more closely. The article describes Oracle's own migration off
Sun servers [internally] onto Linux servers. This has nothing to do with their product offering, as the
previous poster is alluding to.
Phucker.
-J.
...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?
i own stock in both companies so im happy :)
now if only redhat could come out with a spiffy commercial like xp's and start advertising as much as windows - that would be cool!
Ave Molech Setting
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.
successfully destroyed each other as they tried
to take down Windows.
It all started when Scott McNealy in a rash of
unintelligent banter retaliated toward
Oracle by announcing "oh yeah! Well... well...
Solaris will only be supporting Linux
from now on too!"
-J
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
According to the article, they're replacing HP boxen, presumably PA-RISC running HP-UX.
Maybe Oracle and Sun aren't as snuggly as we all thought.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
I would say "when hell freezes over", but I understand that the Kern valley has gotten pretty chilly lately.
What do you know about the corporate culture of Oracle? Did you read Larry's statement about how open standards companies fare in the software market, as I just did?
I can see, in the distant future, some open database replacing Oracle (maybe -- its strongest high-end competition is still proprietary, such as DB2) but Oracle becoming OSS itself seems utterly unthinkable.
It seems from a lot of people's comments that they think that Larry is saying that Oracle will finally support Linux. Well, Oracle has run on Linux for awhile now, though it's been a lower priority. Patches come out for Solaris versions first, then Linux and Windows.
All Larry was saying that at Oracle they'll be running their own product on Linux rather than Solaris. From which we can presume that they'll start making Linux a higher priority when it comes to patching...
that Oracle is not planning its own distro
Actually I wasnt braggin it gets boring being pegged, I posted a couple of articles, sure to get modded down, what do you think happened, they get modded to a 4 and 5 .......
Oh well......
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
I want Oracle 9i for UltraSparc Linux,
and I want it now.
Why does your message leave me wondering if you
are aware that Linux runs on the very RISC machines you are praising?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Those big machines aren't going away anytime soon. There's a reason why Intel hardware is so cheap. It's just plain not as reliable as Sun's.
Not to mention that with what Oracle charges for it's very confusing clustering software, it was actually cheaper for my company to buy one more expensive Sun server to run Oracle on than lots of cheap ones + the clustering software. Since Oracle licences are a recurring expensce, and we just had to buy the Sun server up front, the disparity gets even worse.
That reminds me, I have to take the opportunity to rant about Oracle pricing now. They actually charged us for a second license because our Oracle software is located on a NFS-shared network filer. This way, if the hardware of the DB server takes a shit, we can quickly mount the filesystem Oracle lives on, and start it on another box.
They even said they would not have charged us a second license if we had a second machine powered off, which we brought up in the event of a hardware failure. They claimed that Oracle was providing us the benfit to be able to failover quickly. Umm, no, the network filer is. BEA doesn't charge us for this setup. iPlanet doesn't charge us for this setup. Why should you get to?
PostgresSQL? Right. Then reality hits you and the Open Source movement in the head with a sledgehammer. Oracle scales, performs, and is infinitely more robust and powerful than ANYTHING close to it for Linux. This is not software that someone uses to catalog their little MP3 collection. Open source terabyte relation databases? Hello?
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
Considering that the article says they're replacing some older HP hardware with the new Linux setup, I'm curious to know what boxes they propose to run the Linux on... assuming they had the beefiest HP hardware from 3 years ago, those would be some big boxes; a V2500 or V2600 could hold up to 32 CPU and 32Gb of RAM, as I recall...
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
"Oracle's Version 8 database that Oracle claims exists today."
If you click that link, you go to the same article you're already reading! Get it? Oracle claims it exists today, because they claim it exists today, because they claim it exists today... another huge claim by Oracle with no real evidence to support it!
Probably it was just a goof by ZDNet, but I prefer to think of it as clever commentary.
"I am a cipher, a cipher, wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce" -Jimmy James
This isn't too say he's lying, but don't think Oracle is going to go chucking valuable platforms to back up his rhetoric.
A company like Oracle is known throughout enterprise as a viable, powerful database solution. Many companies rely on Oracle to provide an extensive database solution for their environment. Inevitably, Oracle will probably provide migration kits to allow customers to seemlessly move from their Windows/UNIX based environments to a Linux environment.
The fact that customers trust Oracle for their database product, they should also trust the environment which Oracle says is stable and their chosen environment, especially if Oracle is willing to assist in a seemless migration path.
Oracle also knows that it cannot compromise the integrity and speed of their database - choosing Linux means that they are also confident in Linux's ability to provide that integrity and speed.
The ability to tout Intel's platform as a viable alternative to the expensive hardware that most Oracle databases run on now is merely to suggest the flexibility of Linux being able to run well on various platforms.
I think this is a significant win for Linux considering the locked-in approach many commercial vendors seem to deploy in the enterprise environment. A company as large as Oracle touting Linux as trustworthy, capable, and powerful is a sweet compliment to an operating system that a few years back would have never been considered as an operating system platform for consideration.
Ayup
it is after more versatile than a MiG ;)
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
I work at a big shop and we run Oracle on Solaris. When it comes to your primary customer database in a big enterprise, you don't take chances and you don't play games. If that db crashes once during the middle of the day, no one will care how much up-front capitol you saved. The only thing you'll be trying to save is your job. I don't have much experience with Linux clustering, but it's hard to imagine it meeting the kind of tailored speed and fault tolerance of that proven Sun.
Let's see...
Oracle are saying that big servers will eventually die and be replaced by clusters of smaller servers running Linux.
IBM are saying that clusters of smaller servers will be replaced by mainframe-class servers running Linux.
Place your bets please, ladies and gentlemen.
I mean, seriously, if linux is good enough to run your servers, your databases, why not for other things? If you actually bother to use Oracle it's because there's something really mission-critical running there. Getting more linux competence (or actually more like linux credibility, accustomedness) into the business will easen the jump if they finally decide, say, StarOffice is good enough for parts of what they're doing.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
One would think Microsoft is in some serious trouble with all of the large corporations you hear out there switching to Linux solutions. But ask yourself this: What systems do you think these companies were already running? More often than not, I'd wager they were using UNIX, and the reason they switch to Linux is to reduce costs.
Switching to Linux, when all of your sysadmins know Windows, is going to cost in retraining. If your shop runs UNIX, the sysadmins will be ready to roll with Linux.
So, you see, those who tout Linux and decry Microsoft are really taking an ironic stance. They are helping MS (by hurting their competition) when they advocate Linux.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Must be increased sunspot activity, Larry's outlining paradigms for the future again. Call me when he has a plan that survives longer than 6 months.
And in a few more years, David Axmark, Allan Larsson and Michael "Monty" Widenius will announce the demise of Oracle in favor of the much cheaper, easier to license, and GPLed MySql running on Intel based Linux servers. Ellison is digging his own grave, not that i mind
I don't necessarily buy into this argument, BUT...
Larry is almost certainly thinking of the advantages of commodity nature of the hardware (Intel) [once you get past some of the market speak] not to the nature of the software that happens to run on it (Linux).
Sun is focused largely on HARDWARE, not software. Oracle is primarily about SOFTWARE, not hardware. Oracle can quite easily port their entire line of software, ergo, you're comparing apples and oranges.
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.
E*TRADE Maximizes Efficiencies With Migration to Linux
In the dark bowels of a cubicle farm at Oracle...
Programmers slouch in front of their computers...
And read these fateful words..
Spoken by their master...
Perhaps in haste and bravado...
We'll be on Linux no later than the summer,...
First there is silence...
Then, in one collective voice...
For all to hear...
"Oh shit!"
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.
To post or moderate?
That is the question...
IIC, last time I checked Linux was not 100% (i.e. fully) POSIX compliant. It's close, but not quite there yet.
And another thing, not all applications actually make use of the POSIX infrastructre for programming. Sometimes its more feasible to them to roll their own implementations of the POSIX features.
Just my two cents worth...
If you need the security of protection in case of financial liability, you buy insurance. That's what insurance is for.
It is almost invariably more expensive to buy insurance disguised as something else, be it an extended warranty, support contract, software license, or my personal favorite: a credit card/loan payment protection plan. Straight insurance is almost always less expensive and gives dramatically higher benefits.
kb
I've been told of cases where ironically switching to Linux generated sales for Microsoft. My old University's Linux advocates convinced the school that very few professors or students needed the Sun workstations that the school was buying, that PC's with Linux would meet the needs of nearly all students and professors. What the Linux advocates did not expect was that once the decision was made to replace Sun hardware with PC hardware someone brought up all those useful Windows apps. The decision was quickly made that the PCs should dual boot into Linux or Windows NT.
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
I have always found with Larry you just need to grab a big tub O popcorn and enjoy the show...
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Larry and Bill have been butting heads for a little while now:
Passport v. Oracle DB
Unhackable v. Secure Operating Memmo
Wonder how Bill will respond to this one...
What has this to do with RedHat in particular? It's Linux we're talking about. Case in point, SuSE today made a strategic deal with IBM to work on a Linux distro optimized for IBM's zServer and eServer series (e.g., SuSE gets hardware details long before the rest of the crowd). IBM will deliver both their eServers and their zServers with SuSE Linux, if you wnat to have it.
Anno.
Oracle also will work closely with Linux provider Red Hat Inc. in Research Triangle Park, N.C., to offer customers preconfigured servers loaded with Oracle's application server, 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."
This dramatically simplifies the support responsibility Oracle has accepted. I imagine they'll use commodity hardware and fully redundant RAID systems, so if something dies, they just drop in a replacement and you're running again.
So rather than just getting revenues from selling and supporting the RDBMS, Oracle now gets all that plus revenue from the sale of the hardware & OS and all the continuing revenue of the support contracts.
Sounds like an excellent business opportunity to me.
kb
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
No one owns Linux. The closest you can come is that Linus (Torvalds, of course), owns the copyright ergo he has come control over what you can call Linux.
Now then, would it make sense for Oracle to buy Red Hat, and thereby acquire their own in-house distro, and possibly even the expertise of Alan Cox, et. al who are currently on the RH payroll? Perhaps... if those intellectual assets would stay with RH.
What an Oracle acquisition of a major Linux distro company would get would be an in-house way of telling a particular OS company to take the no-good at security OS and shove it up their collective company *cough* (the smelly and putrid north end of a south bound donkey...)...
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Everybody here knows that you need a 64-bit system, that can address large amounts of contiguous memory, for an effective VLDB.
In this realm, Linux and NT are still in the minor leagues, and guess what Larry said about NT today?
And Microsoft, which to date has not produced any benchmarks that scale beyond 300GB, is nowhere to be found in this high-powered performance arena.
(By the way - this record-setting TPC-H benchmark was set with a Sun E15K.)
Can those boxes run Linux?
"I shall explain this by waving my hands about in an appropriate manner." -- Cambridge University Math Dept.
Does this mean that there is a chance our Oracle National ID cards will be running embedded Linux?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
If I recall correctly, Ellison (sp?) was also well known as predicting the the death of the PC. Everybody would use the internet to connect to giant computers! :)
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
If Oracle is going to be working with Red Hat to offer an "official" Linux version of their database, does that mean the end of the (admittedly rather pricy) Red Hat-branded version of PostgreSQL? If not, are they going to offer a migration path for users who start with the Postgres package, and eventually decide that they need the replication/Java support/marketspeak-compilance of an Oracle solution?
OK, stop this. You keep making claims about what the article says, and you keep being wrong. ("You" collectively.)
The article does *not* state that they're migrating off of Sun machines to Linux. The article states that they're migrating off of some old HP boxes to Linux.
cheers,
Chris
Well its not on the Pentium, but the Merced* chip yes it is. And Linux does run 64 bit on Sparc and Alpha (And maybe a few others). And With IBM Promoting the hell out of Linux on their mainframes it does make a lot of sense to do this from Oracle's point of view.
And lets be honest the box you run Oracle Linux on will be a linux box with most of what you expect to see on it (Apache/Samba/NFS/etc) gone. It will have Oracle and just enough other stuff to run.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
See this page for part of a description of why it's a pain. It simply won't work under redhat due to library incompatibilities. Even doing this didn't *quite* fix it.
Josh Woodward
I am picturing a person in front of a computer trying to get a critical peice of work done when the computer suddenly reboots. He looks up and screams, and the camera zooms into the blackness of his open mouth to a Linux logo with the words, "Got Linux?"
-- Never make a general statement.
If you can buy better third party support with the money you AREN'T spending on OS licenses and proprietary hardware, you're ahead. At some point Sun can't fend off the huge x86 economy that brings this to bear.
In any case its not clear that this move was some calculated measure to simply undermine someone. You're reading too much politics into it.
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.
Nope. You read me wrong. I'm not really anti-MS... I think the gov. should basically leave them alone. But that's because they don't really stand a chance against free software. Sure MS will evolve, but they can't beat the economy of free software.... especially as free software gets closer and closer to the feature set MS has.
It is obvious.
But I don't want linux to be the only choice. I think FreeBSD will always be around. And hopefully GNOME will always give KDE a run for it. But commodity-proprietary software like Windows is just plain doomed.
Larry Ellison loves interesting parallel hardware. He bought NCube and made Oracle run on it! Running Oracle's internal systems on Oracle in interesting configurations is a good way for Oracle to find the bugs in it. So this story doesn't imply that Linux is Oracle's most favored platform or that Sun is going away. It does mean that, once it actually happens, that any Linux-specific Oracle bugs stand a good chance of getting detected quickly and fixed.
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.
Most of MSSQL servers are on Intel Boexs. Larry wants to get that "level" of market from MS. This is a great way to do it. MSSQL can't even come close to Oracles performance.
Of cours I perfer Informix, but Oracle out marketed them.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Don't they offer Sequent Intel-based hardware that is considerably beefier than your average 1U server?
Apparently Larry didn't get the memo that Linux is an unamerican, cancerous toy.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
It is spelled PostgreSQL, not PostgresSQL.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
does this mean linux can save a BILLION dollars next year running oracle?
...is about to replace three Unix servers that run the bulk of its business applications with a cluster of Intel Corp. servers running Linux,...
Why don't they run it on three different piece of hardware with different operating systems to prove that their software works on every system and can coorperate with each other???
That will demonstrate much more than the fact that it runs well on linux...
bash$
LILO: linux init=/u01/oracle/product/8.1.6./bin/oracle
$ find
This saddens me greatly if Oracle is dumping Sun, that would really hurt them. Server rooms will eventually be much less impressive if Sun goes out of business and they are replaced with racks of cheesy intel hardware. There is so much GOOD about Sun I wouldn't know where to begin. It angers me to see the Slashdot comment collective wacking-off, thinking they've won some huge victory. Linux isn't that spectacular...and as far as I can tell it's not business oriented at all. Solaris is so far superior to Linux for so many reasons. Linux is a bunch of guys writing crap on their own time, and proud when it only take 45 hours to get their soundcard working! Hey look! I got X windows to run on my 1 GHz box and the mouse cursor almost isn't jumpy! In addition, suddenly Sun is the "enemy". From personal experience, I know Sun deals a LOT with open source, and they release a LOT of their software for free (especially for small-scale users). I think that if you're a big, successful company you're branded as EVIL, no matter what.
Let me guess, you have a multimilion contract and they had a newbey which could use some training :-)...
#2) When they boast about binary compatibility frSo, as you can see, there is more to the decision than just cost. In the world that i work in, time is money, and the hardware cost is a very small percentage of the TCO.om $1,000 to $10,000,000, they are not kidding. I can give the developers a low end box and know that the app will still work on a mid to high end box
eeuh, 2 posibilities here : a) you're talking hw, and i don't understand you at all. The only one which did care for downward campatibilit was INTEL (also only reason why it stayed popular) b) you're talking about software and then it's just stupid. Just recompiling you're app for newer hardware gives you a better performing app. Binary compatibility is just a stinky way to be able to hide theire source.
#3) It just works. I dont get the "what glib are you using", "is that rev XYZ of that nic?" or any of that other crap.
#4) the hardware seems to last forever and ever and ever. And sun supports the stuff for a long time. Every try and get dell to support a six year old box? yeah, good luck.
Right, but for SUN's 1x price I can get a a newer box each year.
#5) did i mention the support?
Euch you mean the part where you get forwarded from helpdesk to helpdesk and finaly get a ticketnumber saying you're in their problem database ???
#6) it was built to be managed from a serial port and live on a network from day 1. I love the fact that i can put all of my servers in a colo, walk out, and do the OS install from home. I know that PC's are now beginning to get to the point where you can hook a serial cable up and get them to boot from the net and do an os install. lets face it, there are whole books on how to use jumpstart in the sun environment and do 100% hands off installs. It just works, and it is fully supported.
Correct yourself here too.. you are talking about the UNIX way, not about the SUN way. The same can easily and much cheaper be achieved on PC hw with a free unix like bsd or linux.
So, as you can see, there is more to the decision than just cost. In the world that i work in, time is money, and the hardware cost is a very small percentage of the TCO.
Please stop glorifying SUN, the only reason you need them is because they have an IT department with a legal department to back them up. (which is the key for most of their businesses) For the rest it's just a big corp not much diffrent from M$ : some brilliant guys and lot's of morron's acting important
--red
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?
He is such a visionary. I mean just look at all of the Network Computers around that would "inevitably" kill PC's!
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Commercial Support List here.
I'm not saying that PGSQL is already a match for Oracle, though often it is.
;-)
My point is that with sufficient (esp. financial) committment, PGSQL could be upgraded arbitrarily close to Oracle in functionality, so that eventually PGSQL could become an excellent replacement for Oracle.
All you would need is a major player with the resources to put behind it and a willingness to torpedo Oracle.
Until this announcement Sun had the former but not the latter. Now, I'm not so sure.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Amend the statement, like this:
Linux will never replace Minix, or even linux is obsolete...the same has been said. people can be wrong...
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
I'm not sure...but isn't 3 billion documents , including 20 years and 700 million posts of usenet and 330 Million images be scaling? ...and yeah, I think they run oracle...but unless I misunderstand scaling, linux handles it pretty well.
And yes, i know the google links are in pig latin...it's something i'm trying out.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Moving to Intel opens the door for Microsoft. Once the Intel hardware is in, MS can just leverage themselves into corporations' backend. They don't call it Wintel for nothing.
The only thing stopping MS is if Oracle, IBM, and others pull a Jesus Christ and take Linux (or some other Unix) to the next level (whatever that means).
More of Ellison talking out of his ass.r ch ives.asp?ArticleID=24116
What did he say to CRN 11 months ago?
Let's see...
"Our database runs very well on Linux, but I would not try to run our applications live on any scale on Linux,"
http://www.crn.com/sections/BreakingNews/dailya
Mmmm, dunno; they positioned their Itanium based ones to run Linux, but I don't know if it's been back-ported to run on PA-8500 or PA-8600 chips. HP's own web pages no longer mention the V series, so perhaps the local reseller can tell you.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
I would even be ecstatic the day that I can boot an x86 server without video :)
Prepare to be ecstatic: PC Weasel 2000
Sun or Oracle, which to toss... Oracle. Sun can always adopt Linux themselves, and Postress MySQL too. Sorry Lary, I'm sure you will do the right thing and we will have you around for years to come.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
For USD220 per hour, you can bet that Larry will have his consultants doing anything people will pay them for.
www.clarke.ca
...if Oracle starts slipping on the Sun support, there's always Sybase.
You must be kidding. I am using Sybase at work and it is missing a lot features I would be happy to have. Heck, even postgresql in a some features outperforms Sybase, like for example cascade delete/update on foreign keys, dinamic sql in stored porcedures, triggers before and after update (Sybase - only after update, which kind a ivalidates point of foreign keys without cascade delete). I can define my own aggregate functions in PostgreSQL, not in Sybase. Not to mention that Sybase is pretty slow when you get a LOT of data. For now, overal you can say that Sybase is better then PostgreSQL, but gap between then shrinking fast.
I found the majority believe that:
:D
:) No matter how you calculate, Sparc's license fee is at least 1.5 more expensive than Intel's. I've the price sheet on hand. However, if you'd really find a way to run Oracle on Sparc cheaper, don't hesitate to tell me!!! :)
1) Linux = Intel
2) Larry on Linux = Larry bids SUN and other UNIX vendors farewell
3) Why Oracle while we can get PSQL?
4) PSQL can *never* replace Oracle
5) It's a conspiracy! Larry wants to squeeze more from us because Oracle cost more on Intel platforms!!
I just speak from a DBA's standpoint, that:
1) As many has pointed out, Linux is not necessary = intel. Oracle being on Linux doesn't mean abandoning others.
2) If you have really admin/develop on Oracle you must know that Oracle relies heavily on Java, and Java is SUN's. I can only see Oracle and SUN would get more close than any other time in history.
3) & 4) PSQL can *not* beat Oracle now, if you get to know more about Oracle you'd understand how insufficient PSQL is. However, it doesn't mean PSQL, or any other DBMS, can't beat Oracle in the future. I still remember the day when Oracle 5 was regarded as 'cheap' and 'pathetic loser' among DBMS. Look at Solid DBMS, it goes from free to a very successful commercial DBMS in just a couple of year.
5) I failed to find a way to buy a cheaper Oracle for non-intel platforms, compare Mhz by Mhz.
My guess(again, from a DBA's view) is that Larry is not satisfying with the database business in midrange systems. Oracle works great on mainframe and it generates multi-billions profit, while it's always been a big trouble support midrange market because the variety is vast(you name it, SUN, AIX, HP-UX...all with lines of different hardware and software version). Compare to Linux it is relatively simple(note relatively).
Frankly I'm not sure whether Larry and his crews would like to use Linux to fight in midrange market, I'd really doubt about it not because I've little confidence in Linux, but because I felt that even Oracle staffs has then same attitude to Linux as those in Microsoft, that Linux is good for fighting below-midrange market. Of course, I'd disagree if they ask me - I run parallel-replicated Oracle server with Linux's load-balancing with RAID 5 and JFS. It's very depending on how many Linux developers/admins can support the midrange market.
Redundant maybe, interesting definittely not. Read the following article from zdnet and come to tell us that Linux does not hurt MS.
-
Compaq Proliant DL590
-
Linux MM homepage Look at the 64Gb entry from 1999
I'm in no way defending either side, but we must be correct about facts.I do use Linux/Intel in a budget conscious organization, and so far the xSeries servers from IBM have behaved like a charm. I've never deployed SUNs.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
Bottom Line ... I support systems over vast geographical areas. Most of the time the client has no experience with nix. The client usally wants some service or product to be supported 24x7. What do I do? Install the solution on Sun Hardware and Solaris. I configure the systems for dynamic reconfiguration and sleep very well. In fact I just finished a three year contract for support of 3,000 mail users (internal) Calendar services, LDAP and Dual Firewalls.. Down time in three years was 24 minutes for the mail server (Had to add new storage system).
When the customer saw the uptime and the fact that my maintenance was only about 1 hour a week, they decided on a block support contract for the future. Now that company is looking to have the rest of there critical services moved to SUN. Note BIG NT shop.. (yea I replaced exchange that was down 3-5 times a month with 3 engineers supporting that part of the infrastructure) .. Oh did I mention that I am 2,000 miles away and have not even been to the site?
If you know what to do with Sun Platforms you can get outstanding results. So have a experienced engineer implement the solution and have your stressed out junior staff manage the clients..
I love linux and BSD too.I just cannot do the magic that I do on sun boxes with Intel platforms.
BTW.. my support contracts are usually 2x SUN for any wintel or intel solutions.
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
/.ers outside of the NYC area should note that Oracle does not have a booth presence at LinuxWorldExpo. Doesn't look like a strategic change in course. If it were, they would have decided this weeks in advance and then it would have made sense to be publicizing this from the show.
What a weasel. He wants to catch some buzz from the Linux stories, and he doesn't even spend the money for a floor show.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
This smacks of simply putting the squeeze on sun. Big talk, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Sounds like Larry wants some discounts out of Scot.
Just because they aren't in the show doesn't mean he's not a supporter. That's idiotic logic, "They are't at the 'xpo, they must be trash".
This doesn't look like a big hype news article. Just a note and Larry is saying, "Yay, it's better for us to run this stuff on Linux." I don't see any cheesy attempts to attach his name to linux for publicity sake.
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.
Not really. A monopoly in the OS market is the easiest way to go and does have huge economic benefits. That's why windows has 95% market share.
So: choice is good, but choice can live on in a unified, open monopolistic operating system. diversity is probably too expensive..
Huge customer support. If we have problems with our Oracle database servers an Oracle support rep can be on site in a couple of hours.
Great backup, export, and import for enterprise level use. These functions are build right into the database. You don't need to buy extra software and it's multi-platform. Our company has half a dozen server operating systems and each server can back up table space from any other system. Heck I can do it at my desk top now while the server is about 900 miles away in another country.
I could go on about a lot of features in Oracle that I don't think are in Postgree. I am no Postgres expert so if you can prove me wrong please do. But from a large enterprise company standpoint it would be much better to have Oracle.
I think Postgres does well with smaller companies. Oracle does have a lot of overhead and it requires a good DBA to run one properly. If you running a live 24/7 environment with 5 parallel servers for redundency Oracle is a good choice. If you have smaller system needs that don't require a lot of bells and whistles use Postgres or MySql.
Binary compatibility is just a stinky way to be able to hide theire source.
:)
I disagree strongly here. There are apps that were written by companies which are now defunct and also which are cornerstones of workflows of other companies who purchased that software. Having backwards compatibility is a big issue for them.
Just because there is newer/better/faster hardware is not sufficient reason to upgrade. I remember reading about a company that uses (and still uses I guess) AppleIIe computers for a control system for their company. They have custom controller boards and software that plug into those machines and still continue to do the job just fine. Unfortuantely, they have to lurk eBay a lot and other places to find replacement machines for them.
Anyway, remember the old saying: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". There's no reason to upgrade a system that is working perfectly (and has been for years) unless you are a software writer and you need to continue your revenue flow
That "visual tool" was Developer 2000, and yes, it was C-R-A-P.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
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.
I bet you are paying out the nose for support, then. I just have them send the DISK. I'm (on an Intel platform) using RAID5 with an online spare, so when a disk fails, they send a replacement and I send the old one back.
#4) the hardware seems to last forever and ever and ever. And sun supports the stuff for a long time. Every try and get dell to support a six year old box? yeah, good luck.
Hell, I can't get Dell to support a six MONTH old box, but they didn't build the processor, or the motherboard, or the CDROM, or the hard disk, or the video card, or... must I go on... That being said, I have a 486 that's still running (albeit not quickly).
#3) It just works. I dont get the "what glib are you using", "is that rev XYZ of that nic?" or any of that other crap. :-)
You don't get that with Microsoft!
Don't get me wrong, I like Sun stuff. I even own stock! But there are uses for everything, Intel, Sun, even Macs! I just find all these platform Jihads humorous.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
I just wish Oracle would port its products to Linux on the Alpha.
It does indeed make sense for embedded systems:
Toshiba signs for ARM mobile Java chip
ARM Jazelle Technology