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Oracle To Increase Investment In SPARC and Solaris
An anonymous reader writes "The Slashdot community has recently questioned what Oracle will do with Sun hardware if and when Oracle's acquisition of Sun closes. And it seems that speculation about the future of SPARC hardware has been common among Slashdot commenters for years. That said, it seems newsworthy that Oracle is going out of their way with some aggressive marketing directed at IBM to state clearly their plans to put more money than Sun does now into SPARC and Solaris." MySQL is not mentioned in this ad, perhaps because (as Matt Asay speculates) the EU is looking closely into that aspect of the proposed acquisition.
I still expect the sale of the ex-sun hardware business to HP to go through, now Oracle have puffed up the price a bit.
"cool kids"?
Wow. You need to get out more often! :-)
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
The ad says that Oracle will aim for tight integration with its database. That might be less welcome news for those people who do not use it for Oracle databases.
You need to call him "Hillary Clinton's husband" for the young folks to know who you're talking about.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Sun is so cash-strapped that investment in Sparc is at low, almost nothing. So it is easy for Oracle to claim they will outspend what Sun does now....all the while looking for a hardware company on which to dump Sparc off. There are plenty of alternatives to UltraSparc based Sun servers, redundancy and SMP can be done more cost effectively
Sounds like you haven't read this essay yet.
If they didn't invest in SPARC/Solaris, all their potential customers would run - probably to the very competitors who are likely to buy that part of the business. However, by putting in a small amount of cash, they can appear to be keeping those lines alive, thereby making them worth selling. If they didn't, the brands would die within a year and the money spent on their valuation / acquisition, would have been wasted. So this way, a small amount gambled now could lead to a bigger payback when the business is sold off. Simples.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Given how little money Sun had, and how many layoffs they were making and had in the works, for Oracle to invest "more" in Solaris/SPARC than Sun did alone wouldn't take much. What would be actually interesting would be information on the updated product roadmap, which is currently a bit sparse and extremely out of date.
SirWired
Not true
While only 1 of the top 500 is running OpenSolaris (and it's using 2.6Ghz Opterons), still, there is nothing inherently unscalable about Solaris or SPARC. I've personally been logged into a 96 core Sparc machine running Solaris 9 and Oracle 10.
My blog
Would promising to maintain or increase the investment into MySQL actually smooth things over with the EU?... If I were an Oracle exec, I would strongly encourage support for MySQL as a way to keep people away from PostgreSQL. Articles like this show that PostgreSQL has a lot more potential to win over Oracle customers than MySQL does.
but Linux does all those things - part of my job is replacing Sun servers with Oracle RAC clusters on Linux. Faster, cheaper, just as reliable.
Yeah, but you gotta understand. Without Sun there's just IBM. There's no other vendor in the mainframe business, which is still big business. You don't think the IRS has time or money to manage the size of cluster they would need to operate effectively? So they rely on big iron, which is reliable and redundant and engineered to be that way over 40-50 years of experience. Clusters are garbage compared to a real mainframe. Sure, you have distributed filesystems now, and you can sort of split CPU around, there's management systems, etc, but all of this are ideas that come straight from the mainframe os which does all this "by itself". Google managed to make a pretty cool mainframe from commodity hardware but whatever.
Now, if you're not going to go with IBM for your database, you're probably going to go Oracle. But if you need big iron to run this huge database, you're going to have to go with IBM with z/OS and linux virtual machines or something. Oracle now has viable, proven mainframe line and all they have to do is throw money at it. They'll just move to selling complete packages instead of just DB at the mainframe level. With all this "cloud" bullshit (eg "Mainframe on the internet"), big businesses are interested in managed services and Mainframes have always been vendor managed.
Even IBM minis like AS/400 boxes come with full support from IBM. They monitor the box 24/7. I used to operate them long ago, and I remember that a disk went bad in one of our storage boxes (they had these giant enclosures with over 100 disks in them). Literally the message flashed on my console "SYS01281: DISK ERROR" blah blah blah and I turned around to get the binder to figure out what I had to do. By the time I turned back to my desk my phone was ringing and it was IBM support letting me know a tech would be there within 4 hours to replace the drive. Awesome.
So like, Sun/Oracle can do the same thing, and they can compete if they play their cards right. Oracle has poached a lot of high-end people from IBM in the past so this was only a matter of time.
Regarding MySql: MySql is a toy. Go to where the money is and you will find mainframes still. No one in their right mind would put anything important on MySql. Yeah yeah, facebook pft. If Facebook was making more than a few mil they would switch. Internet hits != money. (I'm talking Fortune 25 money, government money, world organization money, casino money, bank money). So I, for one, welcome Oracle and Sun back to this venue.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
.... Their threaded design provides more threads and cores per Watt than other processors, and designs under development is pushing the further in that direction. And at this point, I am not aware of any Linux distribution that supports Niagara (though there may very well be one).
Databases do not benefit as much by fast single thread execution as they do by very reasonable multi-thread execution. That is because in a database application, or Web application, you want to support many sessions.
And as power and heat become issues in large server farms (mostly running database and web applications), the Niagara line is attractive.... The problem hasn't really been Sun's technology, but Sun's marketing and unfocused management. Larry might be a jerk, but he does know how to focus on making money.
If you're talking about single machine SMP, Solaris will go to 256 way SMP on available machines from Sun. Linux can do 1024-way Itanium2. With NUMA architecture things can get even bigger
You mean they fired all of Sun's employees?
With so little overlap with OS and hardware as Oracle did next to nothing with an OS and no hardware at all, I doubt they got rid of many, if any, of those in Sun that are accustomed to managing and selling high end hardware and software. On top of that, Oracle knows how to sell very expensive bits.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
SMP can be done more cost effectively
Bullshit. Say what you want about Sun, but noone does SMP more cost-effectively than they.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Sun and Oracle already work pretty closely with eachother, and I think, without Sun's inept executives (ie. Jonathan Schwartz) bogging them down, Oracle will be able to go far with Sun's excellent employees, who ARE used to that kind of responisbility.
This is pretty much spot on.
Oracle did not buy Sun for Java, and they certainly didn't buy it because Sun is profitable. Oracle purchased Sun because Oracles business is Database Solutions, and Sun just happens to have hardware and software IP that can make Oracles position better in that market.
Its really that simple. Oracle is not going to be throwing away Solaris, SPARC, or MySQL, because these are the very things that Oracle purchased Sun for.
"His name was James Damore."
HP's Itanic... whoops!... Itanium boxes are in the same league as Sun's SPARC boxes and IBM's POWER products, so without Sun, IBM would not exactly be standing unchallenged. (That said, the PA-RISC to Itanic transition in HP admittedly did not go well...)
In addition, I would go so far as to say that Sun wasn't in the mainframe business either. They made really big UNIX boxes, but did not make mainframes. About the only other mainframe company that comes to mind is the Tandem (now HP) NonStop line of products. Unisys claims to make some, and there are a couple of other tiny players out there. But yeah, IBM pretty much had a mainframe monopoly before, and the still have one now.
probably nuggets of insight are better than incite.
256 cores 512 threads is the last limit I saw published by Sun. Please let me know of any bigger claimed value.
in the real world, the biggest machine that can be bought does put a limit on scalability for any business application. I don't see Sun machines leading in real world benchmarks of common business apps either.
As a Linux-on-desktop user, I am dependent on it. It is a critical ap for me.
OpenOffice could finally break the hegemony of MS Office, if it's not screwed up. I know a few people who are now using it on Windows, by choice, not necessity. But if it's screwed up, it's over.
I hope Ellison sees this as his chance to really stick it to Microsoft. I hope he retains and rewards the existing development team, and starts cleaning and optimizing the existing code base, and if needed dedicates additional manpower and resources. I hope Oracle's capable of doing this without screwing it up.
Heavy R&D spending, plus double the number of sales and support engineers is a lot of additional spending unless they can seriously eat into IBM and/or HP's UNIX business, I'll believe it when I see it.