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."

Comments

No Surprise

[stoolpigeon]

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.

Re:No Surprise

[_Sharp'r_]

Why wouldn't Oracle just throw in the hardware with the costs of the license?

Hardware is so cheap and the licenses so expensive that you'd think the sales guy will be on the golf course with the CEO saying, "Tell you what, you buy the unlimited user license for your website for four processors and we'll have our guys build the servers, install the software (really just a drive image) and deliver it ready to go to your datacenter, all for free."

Re:No Surprise

[jedidiah]

Someone might want to INSERT something.

Re:No Surprise

[fm6]

RTFA. There's no "Oracle machine." This is a cobranded HP/Oracle product.

Re:No Surprise

[spazdor]

That's what she said!

Re:No Surprise

[msimm]

Oracle's always been more a blood/turnip company.

Re:No Surprise

[cerberusss]

Why wouldn't Oracle just throw in the hardware with the costs of the license?

That's pretty funny. Maybe the hardware you use at home is cheap. And maybe you even have a couple of throw-away Supermicros in a datacenter. But the Sun and/or EMC kit that, say, a publisher buys is not cheap. Just a couple of 16-way Sun servers with a decent SAN with backup possibility starts around 250K. After negotiating, that is. Now, you can say that this doesn't matter when your Oracle licenses run up to 2,500K but it still isn't pocket change like you're making it sound like.

Re:No Surprise

[Kamokazi]

That's pretty funny. You don't understand that most of the hardware you just mentioned is considerably cheaper to the manufacturer than what you pay (Aside from some of the stuff in the Sun boxes...but those aren't really necessary for a lot of businesses that would still have uses for Oracle). I would say the majority of the cost is for support and to fatten their wallets. Enterprise-grade anything has insane profit margins.

SANs are expensive because of the software/firmware that runs the controllers, failovers, etc. The hardware in them is relatively cheap...most of the components are standard, it's just the controller board that gets custom-designed, which is still not an overly expensive process. (SANs use the same chips that are in $1-2k NICs from Alacritech and others, and even cheaper RAID controllers from LSI, etc.)

Now I don't see making it free, but it would be a good way for them to make it seem like they are giving huge discounts. Take that 40k SAN and cut the cost to 10k and break even. Maybe on lower-end servers it would work...you can easily spec out a throw-away Supermicro for $2k that could handle a hundred or so DB users without flinching.

Core business

[qoncept]

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.

Re:Core business

[eln]

What about all those insurance companies that decided to become investment banks, like AIG? That worked out pretty well, right?

Seriously though, this could work for people that like to hand over the keys to one company and wipe their hands of the whole mess (a non-trivial number of companies), but any company that likes to handle most of its own IT is probably not going to go for it unless Oracle has come up with a way to optimize the hardware for the Oracle DB that no one else has.

Re:Core business

[Red Flayer]

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.

Where've you been the past few years? Insurance companies used to be forbidden from operating in certain other areas. Not so anymore... look at Prudential. They have diversified bigtime.

As for Oracle in particular... this is not an unrelated product. Providing hardware for their software could potentially reduce their support costs significantly. I haven't seen any numbers, and I'm only slightly familiar with Oracle's pricing structure for support, but it seems to me that some of their clientele might prefer one-stop shopping... as they then save money on installation costs.

So rather tha seeing this as Oracle moving away from their core business, maybe a better perspective would be to think of this as supporting their core business.

One other thing to note -- Oracle's core business is no longer software, it's services. While the services business is largely dependent on their software offerings, take a look at their recent revenue figures... and take a bigger look at where their projected growth is.

Re:Core business

[Shotgun]

Could be that you have a limited view of what their core business is. Is it selling databases? Or, could it be selling database services?

For a given number of dollars, what is the optimum hardware to run a database? How much memory of what type vs how much/many hard disks? Which OS? Which drivers?

Selling the hardware will let them present an entire solution that is optimized for the one thing that they want to do...serve data as quickly as possible. The customer is presented with an appliance that will offer the maximum database performance for a given dollar point. Well, at least as optimized as anything can be with an Oracle Database stamp on it.

Re:It's about time!

[jedidiah]

Yeah... cause using an InstallShield style GUI wizard installer is "just so hard".

Actual Information

[fm6]

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.

Re:Actual Information

[More_Cowbell]

Which means a lot of low-end 1U servers. Not exactly a lot of computer power.

You could have gone one step further and actually read the specs before deriding them...

8-HP Proliant DL360 G5 database servers, with
2 quad-core Intel Xeon Processor E5430 (2.66GHz)
32GB memory
1-HP InfiniBand Dual Port HCA
4-146GB SAS 10K hard disk drives
4-24-port InfiniBand switches

14-HP Exadata Storage Server Hardware--each is an HP ProLiant DL180 G5, with
2 quad-core Intel Xeon Processor E5430 (2.66GHz)
8GB memory
1-HP InfiniBand Dual Port HCA
12-300GB SAS or 12-1TB SATA disk drives

Now I won't argue that Sun doesn't put out more robust hardware (for that matter HP does, the DL line is far from their top end), but this is not exactly 'low end' computing power here...

Re:Actual Information

[TheRaven64]

I can definitely promise to consider buying it. Do I have to promise to be able to afford it too?

More information

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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.

It will be good for HP...

[thered2001]

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.

That will be nice...

[The Dancing Panda]

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.

Except it's not really their first foray

[tlambert]

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

Re:It's about time!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's the stupid fucking Java-based installer that they insist on using that runs like shit on every system I've ever seen it on, no matter how beefy a box it is. Fuck those fucking fuckers in their fucking asses.

O.K.- So this means....

[komische_amerikaner]

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?

Re:It's about time!

[Colin Smith]

I can tell you have vast Oracle experience...

 

What about the nCube?

[tramm]

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.

There is more to it than launching runInstaller

[Stone316]

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.

I got mine on order

[C_Kode]

I've already ordered my iOracle Mini for a low low price with no money down...

Might also be linked to a move by Microsoft....

[SixDimensionalArray]

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!