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Oracle To Sell Database Hardware
qazsedcft writes "In a move the company is billing as its first foray into the hardware business, Oracle Corp. said Wednesday it will begin selling server computers that come with its database software pre-installed."
One could now conceivably have a datacenter with Oracle machines, running Oracle OS for Oracle database, Oracle apps and Oracle middleware. This was pretty much the last piece.
Will everyone buy in? I doubt it - but they can now provide everything a business needs from top to bottom, if that business is so inclined.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I don't see Oracle being successful moving in to areas that aren't it's core business (hardware vs software), especially one that's already saturated. The insurance company makes a lot of acquisitions, and the first step is always unloading everything the new company does that isn't insurance, no matter how profitable they've been.
Whale
Well, it's gotta be better than installing Oracle yourself.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Great, now we have a quality product where both software+hardware come from the same source, like Sun's Solaris boxes and Apple's Macs.
slashdot rocks
So this is more like what SecureComputingdoes with their firewalls when they just rebadge off the shelf dell server?
The article doesn't give much information. If the objective is just to rebrand Proliants, it's not interesting. If the objective is to create a "database appliance" pre-optimized for Oracle, easy to administer and cluster, that would be a lot more interesting.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Apparently, the key idea here is "intelligent disks".
It would be nice if submitters took a moment to find some actual information, instead of just submitting the first (usually content free) blurb that they see. A tiny amount of Googling would have turned up this Oracle product page with full technical specs.
It's worth mentioning that this product is not a computer. It's a 42U rack stuffed 8 dbms servers, 14 storage servers, and 4 switches. Which means a lot of low-end 1U servers. Not exactly a lot of computer power. One or two 4U dbms servers and 3 or 4 4U storage servers (like Sun's X4600 and X4500 boxes) would seem more to the point.
The posted story didn't have many details. Look here for more. As you can read, nothing inside is that crazy, but its a nice configuration with massive storage and massive bandwidth. Its not just a simple 1U proliant with oracle.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Now all you need to do to install Oracle is to buy one of these babies.
500 page deinstall guide? A thing of the past. Just chuck the server out the window!
Eval versions of Oracle have been readily available
since long before Free Software was a threat to Larry's
lifestyle. As long as mysql gets installed by default
with key things like proper crash recovery disabled
then there will be plenty of room for proprietary
RDBMS vendors.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Maybe not so good for the customers, though. This seems almost like the mainframe world where peripherals and upgrades often cost more than they should. I envision more than one support contract being voided by adding 'non-approved' hardware to one of these machines.
If your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail.
That will be nice, though I don't know how they plan on doing it. As far as I can tell, it's impossible to install Oracle on anything.
Then when your business finally collapses under the ridiculous financial pressure you can have the Oracle creditors and lawyers too! Get the whole set!
Except it's not really their first foray:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCUBE
This was the company that Larry invested in to build massively (for the time) parallel machines to run Oracle better. He even relocated them to Foster City to get them loser to Oracle corporate headquarters.
A company where I worked (Whistle Communications, and, after they were acquired, IBM) shared the same building with them. When they closed the Foster City office 2002 (after Larry stepped down as CEO), they dumpstered a large number of 19" racks full of interesting hardware.
-- Terry
He always has.
He has a jet fighter because a Ferrari just doesn't compensate enough for him - if-you-know-what-mean.
-The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world.
... to all those sys. admins. and DBA's that once fought through an install of Oracle 8 on a Red Hat Linux platform because someone above them heard the buzz word "Oracle" and thought it would be a good idea?
Will there be a "Vetrans of Oracle Installers" day? Or perhaps a memorial wall?
The Uber
http://www.tulg.org/
http://devurandom.livejournal.com/
I predict they will be as successful as they were with Unbreakable Linux!!
(not very)
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
Resellers make a lot of consulting dollars just on doing the Oracle db install and "tuning" for the applications going on top of the db. Now that Oracle can come pre-installed, this levels the playing field with respect to IBM's DB2 and MS SQL-Server. It would be interesting to know whose idea this was initially: Oracle's or HP's, and to find out who each of them believe this is going to benefit more.
Given the size of the codebase, and how I've seen Oracle used in the past, does this mean that we are now going to see Oracle hardware the size of the old UNIVAC Mainframes?
Don't spend your life lamenting your life.
I hope Oracle includes some sort of automatic patch tool with this distro. There quarterly patches are quite a pain. Although I admit they are getting better as of late.
Oracle had a previous venture into the database hardware business, the nCube. They bought the parallel computer company and attempted to build a database / video-on-demand server from it.
-- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
Yes, installing Oracle is simple.. You could even install Oracle's E-Business Suite easily. The hard part is configuring it and its even harder to configure it for performance.
Behind an environment built for performance is network, SAN and OS. If the admins for theses services aren't familiar with your application or databases then chances are its not configured optimally. You wouldn't believe how many arguments I have had with OS and SAN admins who believe that they can use the same generic configuration that they use for any other server.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
I've already ordered my iOracle Mini for a low low price with no money down...
Oracle used to sell specialized Oracle hardware back in the day. They bought a company in Landover, MD, I think they were called Gould Systems, but they made machines to run Oracle.
Oracle later re-named them the Oracle Complex Systems Group, then later still, axed the whole thing.
Seems someone in PR doesn't know their own company's history...
-Runz
I wonder what their approach to maintenance and service will be. These tasks tends to be rather critical for a database system. I also expect that for many of Oracle's customers, running cost would be the decisive factor, and not purchase cost.
Maintenance costs vary rather wildly from the around 3% of purchase cost per year you expect to be charged for next-business-day-on-site service purely for computer hardware, over the about 10% per year that a supplier of really high-tech stuff will charge you, to the 500% or more per year that an IT department may charge to keep a computer running, maintained, secure, and backed-up. I've seen figures up to 2000%, admittedly as the bloated end result of an apparatchik mentality.
The attractiveness of a standard vendor system may be economies of scale -- if Oracle and HP can sell a lot of them, maintenance on them could be relatively cheap. For people who don't really need a carefully tuned and powerful system, that could be very attractive.
In 5 to 10 years, people will sneer at Oracle the way we all like to sneer at Cobol today. Sure, there will be a lot of Oracle jobs out there but the cool hombres won't touch it.
O... O.. O... Ohhhhh.
I'll bet the board room deliberated this one carefully... LOL
(Reminds me of the time years ago when one late night at work i called a company to get address information. I hit one extra digit. The something vox system said, "There IS no extention: Two-OH-four." I tried again. Got same response. Tired, antsy, and wanting to go home, I was up for fun and games. I hit -rapidly- something like: 12000000, and she responded, "There IS no extension: One Two OH OH OH OH OH OH OH...." (Eventually, i got the right number, but returned to the "OH" game a bit...)
I couldn't STOP laughing. Did it a few more times... Next morning, i gathered up some co-workers, repeated the performance, and there was great laughter. But, no sexual discrimination worries...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Rats; I thought it might finally be Raw Iron, but it's Oracle Enterprise Linux. I wonder if their branded linux runs the database faster than Redhat or proprietary unixes?
Oracle tried an H-P base appliance about 10 years ago. Granted that given the advances and new Oracle products (home brewed and bought) of the past decade this new offering is substantially different than what came in the Raw Iron box. But this is not the first time that Oracle wanted to back up the truck and offload a turnkey system.
I think some of you here are missing the point of the product. It is an appliance of sorts that is meant to compete with the likes of Netezza and Teradata, i.e. massively parallel, share nothing database architectures meant for datawarehousing. Typically, that means long running queries over gigabytes and terabytes of data.
Note the name of Exabyte. The prefix "exa" is greater than the prefix of "tera" in Teradata. They are trying to compete with Teradata.
Sure, it also claims to have good OLTP capability in addition to going for the OLAP market. But, this isn't a product for a web app database, high transaction volume (hotel reservations), or customer database. It is a product to mine all of the data generated by customers you interact with. All the data you generate when all the doubleclick, etc., tags fire on your websites.
The point of having several 1U, 2 processor machines is to make it like a grid. Again, this is for massively parallel database architectures. I am sure that the the storage servers serve the data to an Oracle RAC installation, thus the 1U 2 processor machines as RAC is meant to be run on lots of small machines.
On the note of massively parallel database architectures, check out Greenplum for a company using MySQL to attack this market.
-fragbait
This might be a response to the fact that Microsoft recently purchased a company that sells integrated hardware/software for databases/data warehousing supporting massively parallel processing, named Datallegro. They are currently integrating it with SQL Server 2008. Somewhat exciting, in my opinion!
If I am Joe Hardwarewhore, pitchin' HP or Sun solutions, this really ought to piss me off. Oracle selling hardware, is tantamount to Microsoft selling pre-installed Exchange Servers, something that would end up in a Dell or HP lawsuit in a MINUTE.
Now, admittedly, VARs have literally written the book on how to fail, so I can see where Oracle might want to strike out on their own, but its bad business. If your VAR channel fails, it is your job to train them, stoke them, incentive-ize them into performing on your behalf.
This will end badly.
Oracle also has eval versions of most other software at OTN, but there's no activation or any of that crap. Licensing is controlled by legal means, not technical measures. When Oracle buys other proprietary software vendors, the first thing the company does after change-in-control is give away unlimited-use licenses (aka disable licensing as much as can easily be done). The second thing the company does is rip out licensing entirely in the next version of the product.
And yes, I'm an Oracle employee, posting AC because I'm not authorized to speak for the company.
I suppose if Sun can sell hw, os, and database; Oracle has to say they can do the same thing.
I can remember when it was normal for the same company to provide all hw and sw.
lol, they could give the hardware and software away and just sell the patches