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Oracle Won't Abandon SPARC, Says Ellison
fm6 writes "When the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems was announced, it was widely assumed that Oracle was interested only in Sun's software technology, and would sell or discontinue all its hardware businesses. Larry Ellison, in an interview just posted on the Oracle web site, says that's not what's going to happen. In particular, SPARC isn't going anywhere (PDF): 'Once we own Sun we're going to increase the investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very, very important. Even Apple is designing its own chips these days.'"
I mean, how are you going to mitigate the blitzkrieg campaign IBM has launched against SPARC while you're busy with the merger details?
My work here is dung.
"Even Apple is designing its own chips these days."
Unlike Oracle, I think Apple is traditionally a hardware company.
I wish them the best carrying on the Sun baton.
Well, of course he's going to say that - he's not just going to say "well, we're planning on axing 20,000 jobs and kissing bye-bye to the SPARC line". He has to at least maintain the *illusion* that they're going to keep producing SPARC chips.
I love the line about "even Apple" is designing its own chips. One could say "even Sun" sells Intel.
Cemil.
hell, even doritos make their own chips
They left a message about Apple and something.
So, just dump more processors in a box, and optimise the processor's design to your needs.
Apple figured it out, and Oracle's not stupid. This should work until the next big jump in processor design.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
For many years, there were a multitude of different architectures, and all of them were supported by major software developers. Over time the number has gotten smaller and smaller, the only one used in typical desktop computers anymore is the x86 (mainly thanks to Intel investing mountains of money into the manufacturing process). Unfortunately for Intel, manufacturing isn't the advantage it once was: AMD is still able to compete with them moderately well even when they've been a generation behind in manufacturing. Other things are coming into play besides raw processing power, things like power consumption and battery life.
Intel is going to have trouble competing on battery life with ARM, or even PowerPC. Going into the future, we are going to see more ARM based netbooks (and they are going to be more usable), and the already common ARM handheld device is going to become more powerful. Suddenly there is going to be a need for software that runs on more than one architecture again. This is a good thing, in my opinion: it means x86 will not necessarily be the dominant processor forever into the future.
Qxe4
Ellison always finds ways to throw tiny daggers at Microsoft.
While Oracle is big, I kind of doubt that they could ever keep up with Intel. Even in turn-key appliance servers (sort of an iMac of databases, pre-configured computer), Intel/AMD will outstrip them in performance and they won't be able to stay up to date.
The only place I can think that this would be useful is routers. In a turn-key appliance like that that does a very specialized job (especially one that requires custom silicon to do the routing fast enough), SPARC could make sense. It would make it harder to steal their software (because you'd have to run on SPARC). It would give them total control (no need to source processors from external companies). They could even build the SPARC cores into the same chips that hold all the magic high-speed routing magic.
SPARC could be useful, but I doubt they'll try and compete in the general market.
This is just off the top of my head. Is there something special about SPARC that would make it remarkably good at some specific application that Oracle uses?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Sun makes (made) awesome technology. They built things no one else could build. They also built things no one wanted. In fact, they had a really hard time figuring out what people wanted, this was their weakness.
Oracle, on the other hand, is extremely good and marketing. They are especially good at marketing to business. They are also good at knowing what businesses want (or alternately, making business people want what they have). I don't like Oracle, but I have to say this may be the best thing that's happened for Sparc in a long time.
Qxe4
I'll wager this character "!"
I have a funny remark regarding what Ballmer is doing but my post would be tagged as flamebait, so I'll just write the clencher: Toilet paper.
It's not routers -- it's specialty appliances.
Take for instance your GPU -- it's just a processor that's tuned to do one specific task. Now, imagine that Oracle could take Sun's experience to customize a chip for the type of instructions that their database used a lot. Sure, the chip might not compete on all tasks, but if they could give a simple drop-in oracle appliance (or even a mysql appliance, and make money by selling hardware and support for it), they might have a reason to stay in the hardware business.
Now, I don't think that they should actually make the chips -- just design them for the right balance of power consumption / integer performance / floating point / cache / whatever makes sense for their applications.
Oh -- and to answer your question -- Sun is Oracle's recommended software platform. And Sun bought the Cray assets from SGI -- the E10k and other 5 digit models are descendants of that line. SPARC are highly reliable, high performance processors (or at least, they were back when I used to work on Suns ... from 1995-2003) -- but it's like RAID -- if you can throw 10 cheaper processors at it, do we really need the one big one? And that all depends on what you're trying to run on it.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Paranoid slashvertisement mutterings are one thing but this is a little blatant. http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/4136/javaidh.png
WOw, I didnt know oracle was buying Sun. I wonder will this increase oracles usage on Solaris
Doesn't that sound like they did actually want to keep all the Sun's hardware business including SPARC from the very beginning?
WOw, I didnt know oracle was buying Sun.
I wonder will this increase oracles usage on Solaris
I'm going to bookmark this thread and reference whenever someone says "there's no such thing as a stupid question."
1. If you scrolled down this far, you would have seen the link to the story about Oracle buying Sun titled "Oracle buys Sun" or any of the dozen related stories on slashdot or other sites including mainstream news.
2. Solaris on SPARC is already the largest base for deployment of Oracle.
I kindly request you change your handle from t3chn0n3rd to something that doesn't imply a familiarity with the technology world.
If you have recently been in a coma I apologize for being so blunt.
"Oh you want support for a database product on commodity hardware? Well we have this little MySQL thing you can use.
Oh you want to continue to run Oracle? Well that is now only supported on our new line of SPARC hardware."
Oracle can now (and will) sell you the entire database from sand to sql results at whatever price they deem acceptable to themselves this quarter. You thought license costs were crazy before? Well now they come with official hardware and support contracts for the box.
--- I do not moderate.
I mean, how are you going to mitigate the blitzkrieg campaign IBM has launched against SPARC while you're busy with the merger details?
Interesting choice of the word blitzkrieg to characterize the marketing campaign. I think it's very appropriate.
Blitzkrieg was a tactic to concentrate a large fast assault on the weakest part of the enemy, disregarding the flanks and trying to avoid the strong points.
It had success early on for the Germans, it was not something that could easily be maintained and after a year or so the allies were able to adapt to counter those types of attacks.
Lets not forget who won the war.
IBM is trying to take advantage of the uncertainty some people have with the merger to grab some of Sun's hardware business.
Dual Opteron < $600
This is just a minor nitpick, but knowing what your customers want is part of the marketing. Marketing is not just advertising, though many seem to forget that.
Could dedicated database hardware outperform generic x86/sparc in the same way that GPUs are several orders of magnitude faster than software rendering? I would presume that databases are too large and varied compared to the "run a single task 2 million times in parallel" of graphics, but I am not a database coder...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Apple is a software company which happens to design hardware that they believe will run their software perfectly. It is hard to explain but, if you look at pre touch iPods, they are significantly weaker than other offerings in hardware specs. What makes people buy them is the software they run. Same thing can be said for iPhone vs. Nokia 5800. They didn't change overnight, it is same deal since first Apple 1. That is why people dreaming about official OS X on generic PC are kinda... Dreaming.
If Oracle has this neat idea of having devices, gigantic mainframe like servers (Sun's top line), portable enterprise database servers.. They are going with Apple's idea. Of course, they aren't stupid to abandon their "runs on Linux/AIX/zOS/Windows/Whatever" software.
Just imagine a Sparc which have accelerator functions just for database operations. That kind of possibilities kept Apple in PowerPC for years, G4/G5 especially have some excellent functions for media which came from Apple. Of course, times has changed and IBM started to hate end user desktop except consoles so they sold them out and moved to Intel. If you look at how easy was for Apple to move to Intel and how easy for them to release software for Windows when they want, you can't call them just a hardware company.
If something really bad happened to Apple, it is even possible to release OS X/iTools/iWork for Windows. Of course, we wouldn't get the same experience on millions of different configurations and substandard $10 cards. That is why you see Apple hardware.
You hit it in one. IF your company runs Oracle on Red Hat, prepare to get fucked.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Even Apple is designing its own chips these days.
Am I the only one whom read this sentense with an emphasis on the word "even"? I'm asking because it was funny and even funnier if it wasn't intentional.
I am the lawn!
I recently attended an Oracle conference. One thing that struck me about Oracle's strategy is that they get the best of the products they acquired and integrate into their current/own system.
E.g. if a user interface is better in the company's product they just bought, they will integrate it in their current system product.
They may integrate some features from MySQL that are superior to Oracle DB as an e.g.
In the future, try thinking before speaking.
...there are just inquisitive idiots.
We are all packets in the Internet of life!
"But the appeal of the Mac and the Lisa was as much or more fashion and style as it was practical."
That's an interesting statement, and it betrays more about you than about the topic we're discussing. I remember back when I went to school and the schoolwork our teachers handed out suddenly changed from photocopied hand-written stuff to neatly layouted, professionally looking stuff. That was when the Mac came out and normal people were suddenly able to use computers in a meaningful way.
You're a geek. You don't care about normal people, because you were perfectly happy with DOS or whatever you were using. To you, all that stuff that made computers usable for everyone else was just "fashion".
You were as wrong then as you are now.
To you, the iPod is a fashion statement because you were happy with the MP3 players that came before the iPod. To most people, those were unusable, bulky pieces of crap. You were happy with cell phones before the iPhone came out. Most people hated their cell phones and used them only for the most basic things.
Perhaps creating things normal people can actually use seems like "fashion" to you, but most people don't use these devices for their own sake; they don't enjoy learning complex stuff just to learn complex stuff. They want to get stuff done, and all of those things that you like, all those ways you can tinker with your toys actually only get in their way.
Apple's success is not about fashion and style, it is about normal people getting stuff done.
Actually, many specialty appliances are now moving to x86 hardware. Off the top of my head, Cisco and F5 both deploy linux/unix on x86 hardware.
What in the world does "UI design" have to do with "style"?
To the most expensive nix hardware. Oracle specifically tied into their hardware. Bend over.
Germany was a small country fighting the whole world. They lost not so much because blitzkrieg wasn't a valid tactic but because it is hard to win a battle when you fight a million soldiers and the enemy has a million in reserve.
But in this case, it is IBM who is the giant. So if you want to compare things, this is the D-day landings by the free-world/IBM vs the much beleagured Nazi's/Sun who is fighting to many battles on to many fronts and who just can't keep up with the tech race.
Analogies, you really shouldn't stretch them to far or they turn against you.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is just a minor nitpick, but knowing what your customers want is part of the marketing.
Good marketing includes hookers and blow.
Give 'em that and then your customers will buy whatever you are selling.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I'd rather get a database-in-a-box that works so well you forget it's there until your receptionist calls you because it's detected a bad drive and ordered a replacement for you... rather than one where you have to find the magic dongle headphones before you can turn it on.
Yep.
It's only really a problem when you are trying to sell hookers and blow.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
You mean "Plopsky!"
-ski is Polish, not Russian.
Actually if everybody is using hookers and blow for marketing, then everybody is your customer for hookers and blow.
The Internet Book Database
With all of the talk about SPARC (I use and love the new 8 core SPARCs) there hasn't been an talk of Sun's StorageTek disk and tape drives. The 4GbFC, 1TB T10000K drive is critical for enterprise storage. Legacy support for 9940s and 9840s are also critical for big iron. I don't like the idea of having to move to IBM 1130s. Sun SATA JBOD arrays are excellent tier 3 storage, they can move a lot of IO for not a lot of cash. Put a Sun 5220 server (or Mx000) with multiple 4Gb FC HBAs in front of SATA using ZFS and you can build a massive data warehouse or backup system.
That must be why they kept going into companies to sell Oracle RDBMS, only to find the companies preferred MySQL.
Yes, much like people buy hotdogs from the guy with the wiener cart, except when he is giving them away.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
You must work for EMC
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
With all the talk of container and "lego" data centers, Oracle wants to become fully vertically integrated so that you can go to Oracle and say: "I've got $10 million -- sell my data center blocks".
Sun's already been developing their own data-center-in-a-shipping-container, and Oracle now has all the bits and pieces:
Also, having a horde of hardware engineers is Ellison's wet dream. As I said before, Larry Ellison wakes up every morning and asks himself, "How can I [fsck] Microsoft today?" Larry has stated in the past he wouldn't mind moving beyond databases, and with Sun's hardware and Java, he's poised to do pretty much anything he wants. So he might entertain delusions of mobile, return of the net appliances, home multimedia, etc. In the short term, though, I think he's hoping he can create custom hardware to make Oracle and Java run much faster. Will he succeed? Dunno, but Larry Ellison has a ferocious desire to succeed, and often, that's all you need.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
They also built things no one wanted. In fact, they had a really hard time figuring out what people wanted, this was their weakness.
That was supposed to be the job of their ambassadors and maybe the sales/marketing people - to get feedback from potential customers as to what they wanted to see in future products. Problem is, they mostly wanted a solid reliable OS that that they wouldn't have to wait for the first service pack before upgrading an entire department as well as having a competitive price/performance ratio.
For Sparc processors like Niagara II, the server group would want more cache and hardware support for encryption, but the workstation group would want more floating-point processors. In the end they both get what they want with multi-core chips.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Intel and AMD aren't doing 64+ execution threads on a chip yet.
(Most people's knowledge of SPARC - and MySQL, coincidentally - seems not to have been updated since 1998...)
you had me at #!
I very much doubt that any shop that chose MySQL over Oracle did so for any reason but price.
In other words, such a shop was never really a potential customer.
".. it was widely assumed that Oracle was interested only in Sun's software technology ..."
Java is open source, so there's not much reason to buy it. What other Sun software technology would Oracle want?
Currently netbooks are just scaled-down notebooks that either run Linux or Windows XP home. Recreating this on ARM is problematic.
On the other hand, if netbook is just a browser appliance (which better matches the name), than all you need to develop worst case is just a web browser and a network stack.
Cloud computing and Cloud OS-s means come back to "Main Frame" architecture with complimentary dummy terminals in form of web browser. Now days the most important thing is processing power per Kilowatt so clusters build on computers containing multiple processors would be more efficient then clusters built on single or 4-8 core computers. And SUN is very good in building multi-processor computers, so SUN's cloud would be the most efficient in terms of energy consumption, and final price of hosting applications in its cloud would be the lowest.
Ultimately SUN can build cloud in form of one single supercomputer having millions of processors under control of one single OS. I just want to say that the whole Cloud management can be implemented in hardware layer. As I know Oracle has no cloud so far, so this acquisition opens a lot of space for investments.
One year ago I started small internet project, I am software developer and decided to help to build a small start up project for free. No options to pay my own money for software I went to open source, so I used CentOS, MySQL, Apache, PHP and Joomla. I wrote a lot of extra components in form of plug-ins and modules, fixed a lot of bugs in Joomla. So I invested a lot of my time into the project. The original price of hosting was just $15 a month. Then when I transferred static content from old plain HTML web site we decided to upgrade to Virtual PC hosting for $50 a month, then I finished first stage of data consolidation from vendors and DB grow up to 5 megabyte and we decided to upgrade our Virtual PC hosting to second level up to $100 a month. Then I completed details consolidation from vendors and database size jumped to 15Gb and 50 million records and we decided to rent server for $130 a month. At this moment I have several options for further performance improvement: first one is to rent more expensive server having more powerful RAID, second option is to purchase Oracle and rewrite my custom components, historically I know Oracle very well so it is not a problem for me to reconnect my components from MySQL to Oracle and final 3-d option is to migrate everything directly to some cloud.
What way should I go?
1. Replace MySQL with Oracle
2. Upgrade hardware?
3. Go to cloud?
My project is already profitable, so all options are real. Oracle license is expensive, and migrating to it requires extra efforts from my side. Upgrading hardware is cheapest but it cannot solve all performance problems. So I think the best solution is to consider rewriting the whole project for cloud.
So what I want to say. If Oracle writes extra commercial DB engine for MySQL database it would be a real option for me to invest into it instead of rewriting my staff. Or ultimately if Oracle writes extra MySQL compatable engines based Oracle technologies in SUN cloud, I am the new Oracle client, I would go into SUN cloud without any hesitation.
Oh really? Does this happen a lot? Then maybe you'd like to explain how Oracle made $5billion profit last year (and $4billion the year before)?
Qxe4
Because different people have different responsibilities.
This is marketing, the marketing group will handle this. Those guys don't have the expertise to work on 'merger details' other than gathering and developing counter strategies, and they'll have individuals from both Sun and Oracle's marketing groups work on something with a little oversight from a vice president or executive concerning strategy. If they need one of the executives to answer questions, they'll have one of them give an interview or press conference for an hour.
The technical groups and the vice presidents and their assistants will execute the plans as the executives make the decisions. When a manager is need as speaking head to handle
Oracle wanted the hardware, so they could become the kind of top-to-bottom solution that IBM used to be in the Mainframe days. IBM failed to prevent it, so now they're loudly saying "sour grapes! sour grapes!"
I suspect the commentators who missed why IBM and Oracle wanted Sun were the same ones who said IBM and Sun were doomed technologies, and that the future was NT 4 on Intel x86-32.
And to answer the question literally, you put your marketers on marketing the company while you put your lawyers on working on the merger. I assume they're different people (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
What's the difference between a duck?
IBM is only 35% bigger than Oracle+Sun
Oracle 2008 Revenue: 22B
Sun 2008 Revenue: 13B
Combined=35B
IBM 2008 Revenue: 103B
That's 294% bigger than Oracle+Sun
"I mean, how are you going to mitigate the blitzkrieg campaign IBM has launched against SPARC while you're busy with the merger details?"
By having Oracle's CEO telling SPARC's clients there's nothing to worry about, that the new owner will not only support but even increase development of the platform, perhaps?
"Yes, much like people buy hotdogs from the guy with the wiener cart, except when he is giving them away."
First dose for free, man, but only first dose.
Don't ask me, ask Oracle. They're the ones who blogged this anecdote. But I suspect it's entirely possible for Oracle to survive on past successes for quite a while.
I guess I mis-stated my question. What I was wondering is why do you think people are moving away from Oracle en mass to mysql? Because that's the first I've heard of it. I'm wondering if you have information I am unaware of.
Qxe4
"Blitzkrieg was a tactic to concentrate a large fast assault on the weakest part of the enemy"
No, it wasn't. I think you are making a fuss between Napoleonic and Guderian's tactics. As the very name implies, the key factor on blitzkrieg was fastness and surprise (thus the implied need of mechanized cavalry) while Napoleon's point was beating with your strongest forces on the weakest point of your enemy. Not that those both are not related, but still not quite the same.
"It had success early on for the Germans, it was not something that could easily be maintained and after a year or so"
Of course not! after a year or so of fast raiding your army would fall by the End of the World!
"so the allies were able to adapt to counter those types of attacks."
Or there was no place to fast raid to. Of course blitzkrieg is not a strategy for a long running war but to end a war really fast. Hitler was not able to end his European war in a fast manner so blitzkrieg had to be abandoned (it's obvious after Dunkerk and Hitler's inability to take Great Britain), not that allies countered nothing.
"Lets not forget who won the war."
But then, where Hitler failed, USA didn't: last campaign over Irak was a blitzkrieg by the book (fast, based on mechanized cavalvry, piercing the borders and then forget about flanks and going directly to the heart of the enemy -the capital city, in this case...) and it ended up succesfully as such (Irak's government surrended). Indeed the "historical problem" with blitzkrieg-like wars is that they don't end up on big bold letters on history books since -when succesful, they are so fast: as the most egregious example, who knows almost anything about Caesar's campaign over Persia *except* the very epygram "veni, vedi, vici"?
"IBM is trying to take advantage of the uncertainty some people have with the merger to grab some of Sun's hardware business."
The point is that when you lose "something" you can recover, but if your enemy manages to make you lose "all" there's no chance to recover: you get extinguished.
Not sure. Probably just because MySQL is "good enough" (albeit, far from perfect, and I personally prefer PostgreSQL regardless), and perhaps just because it's free, or because the nature of database-backed applications is gradually changing from a huge, complex, expensive setup on reliable hardware to a redundant, flexible, simple, cheap setup on commodity hardware.
I think Oracle themselves will probably provide more insight into the issue, when we see what way they proceed with MySQL and Oracle RDBMS.
Lets make this simple because you seem to be having trouble.
You claimed that Oracle was going into businesses and being told they prefer MySQL.
Then you said that was something you read on an Oracle blog.
How about you start by posting a link to said blog to back up what you're saying?
Stop being a lazy prick and go read their blog if you're so damn interested. I'm not doing to hold your hand like you're a two year-old when it was only posted recently. And watch the attitude.
It may be true, personally I prefer postgres as well. Oracle has a lot of other products other than a database, I don't completely understand them all because I am not the target market, but they are obviously doing very well. They seem to know what they are doing, so while I don't like them as a company at all, I would not bet against them making a profit in some way.
Qxe4
You're the one that made the claim. Then said Oracle said it in their blog. Never heard this before and Oracle doesn't have a blog, their employees have multiple blogs so it's not something that would be easy to find.
It sounds like your just full of it since you can't back it up.
What might be nice is something like the Cell approach, so that different cores provide better support for different things. A bunch of crypto cores, a nice farm of FPUs, etc.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Thank you for your expert opinion. Your thoughtful arguments have really changed my opinion.
If fashion is the only thing that differentiates the iPhone, how come every other manufacturer is trying to copy the iPhone's user interaction?
People use their phones for texting, SMS and MMS, and perhaps for simple games and taking pictures, even if these phones come with browsers and bluetooth and calendars. The same people use their iPhones for surfing the net, Facebook, Twitter, they have their calendars on their iPhones, they have their pictures on their iPhones, they put their music on their iPhones. Not because other phones don't offer these features, but because the iPhone makes these features accessible to normal people.
And yes, the fact that MMS is missing sucks.