Slashdot Mirror
Explaining Oracle's Sun Takeover — "For the Hardware"
blackbearnh writes "Brian Aker, former Sun MySQL guy, and current proponent of the Drizzle MySQL fork, gave O'Reilly Radar an update on where MySQL is at the moment. During the interview, he was asked to speculate on Oracle's original motives for acquiring Sun. 'IBM has been moving their pSeries systems into datacenter after datacenter, replacing Sun-based hardware. I believe that Oracle saw this and asked themselves, "What is the next thing that IBM is going to do?" That's easy. IBM is going to start pushing DB2 and the rest of their software stack into those environments. Now whether or not they'll be successful, I don't know. I suspect once Oracle reflected on their own need for hardware to scale up on, they saw a need to dive into the hardware business. I'm betting that they looked at Apple's margins on hardware, and saw potential in doing the same with Sun's hardware business. I'm sure everything else Sun owned looked nice and scrumptious, but Oracle bought Sun for the hardware.'"
Error 503 everwhere I go!
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
Not for the lulz as I originally supposed.
Customers, potential customers, and to stick it to IBM.
The OS is just a vehicle for a database.
Oracle has been saying that they won't support Solaris on non-Sun/Oracle branded gear. This essentially means that even if 70% of your gear is Sun hardware running Solaris they won't support the 30%, even if that 30% was bought because there wasn't a good fit with Sun gear.
I've heard the same thing about Java support.
To add insult to injury, Project Caiman in OpenSolaris is going to force everyone to rebuild a lot of infrastructure and process (for reasons that all seem to point to ego and a complete misunderstanding of how sysadmins actually do their jobs).
As a result, many companies (including the one I work for) are looking at making the jump to Linux on cheaper hardware. Given some of the other posts (including fanboi's like BenR), we're clearly not the only ones thinking this.
Oracle originally only made an offer for Sun's hardware assets. They only bought the entire company after IBM made a bid for it. That doesn't sound much like Oracle had much enthusiasm for Sun's hardware. Apparently they bought it only because it came with the dinner.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Cringely was on about this a year ago - Oracle needs Sun hardware to scale.
Go go ahead and GPL ZFS, guys.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
see subject
If Sun hardware can't compete with the P-series, why would Oracle want to buy it? (If current Sun customers don't even want to buy Sun hardware, why would anyone?)
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Isn't Sun's ridiculously overpriced and underpowered hardware the reason they went bankrupt?
They are doing a crap job. Why? Well if you buy expensive SPARC hardware, you are going to run Solaris on it. It is the only thing really well made for that architecture. So what is Oracle now doing? Charging for Solaris. Not just charging, but being total dicks about it. You have to have their agreement, if you at any time lapse in the agreement, not only do you not get security updates, you are required to uninstall all the ones you've already installed.
Hmmmmm... How do I feel about that for critical systems.... Oh ya: Fuck you.
Seriously, this kind of shit could well kill SPARC. It is a very limited use platform anyhow. If you start screwing people over they may well abandon you for IBM's offerings, or just commodity x86 stuff (which is getting more and more high end offerings all the time).
To me, it seems like Oracle WANTS to kill off the hardware. They can't just say "Nope, it is all discontinued, go away," as Sun has preexisting contracts with people and the contracts come with everything else. However if they are big enough dicks, everyone will switch of their own accord.
It's that, or they really don't know how to try and run a competitive hardware business.
looked nice and scrumptious
not a fan of this guys tech vocabulary
Long live the BSD license
oracle bought sun for one reason only, for a strategic asset that is very valuable to oracle:
Java.
So much of the oracle software stack depends on java.
Personnaly, I think that java is a slow, monstrous abomination that should have been killed off years ago. I have yet to see a fast, well written server-side java app.
We go over 2 to the power of 21 on UIDs maybe? That would be 2,097,152. Seen some pretty high ones lately.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So I've been working with Unix vendors for wow--decades now--and have worked very closely with some of them, as a big customer and also as a 'strategic partner.' I've never been close enough to see the email in the company, but maybe that gives me a bit of neutrality to my knowledge. Anyways, here's what I see:
1) IBM? Nobody buys P-series. Oil/Gas doesn't buy them, telecom doesn't buy them, entertainment doesn't buy them, and that leaves financials. Maybe the banks are buying P-series, but to replace Sun gear? I doubt it. More likely, they're replacing VAX and S/390 gear. (Yeah, still.)
2) Sun's hardware (i.e. SPARC gear) has some very nice features, but is not in the same category for _general_ computing power. Massively multithreaded jobs belong on SPARC, small-thread number crunching belongs on the GHz-of-the-day winner, and that's x86-derived. Sun has also thrown away most of their competitive advantage in the x86 market by embracing Windows. If it weren't for Windows compatability, they could have had Open Boot Prom on every single box they sell, but instead we're stuck with a third-rate BIOS and ILOM (LOM designed by committee of middle managers).
3) Software ls really the most valuable asset that Sun had at the end, but the problem has always been monetizing software. Sun's model actually worked well (it was the follow-through they eventually fell apart on)! Sell hardware, give away software, include training credits with hardware purchases, and soak you for enterprise support. There aren't a lot of big companies unwilling to pay Sun's prices for great support on rock-solid products, but there are a lot who don't want to pay for CRAP support on flakey products, which is what Sun has been offering for two years now.
Oracle could make out like a bandit if they rationalised the SPARC lineup, maintained the model, and fixed the support issues. Instead, they're destroying the business model, breaking support EVEN MORE, and ignoring all Sun products. I'm afraid that Larry Ellison thinks he just bought a hardware monopoly to support his software monopoly, and is going to be in for a rude surprise when customers leave him in droves for Linux or Microsoft.
I don't like it, but I don't see much of an alternative. The egos are too big to keep good products alive and relevant, so they're all going to fall apart.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
We've deployed a few P-series systems in place of where we would have deployed big Sun boxes.
My observations are thus:
1. I like Solaris way better than AIX.
2. If you consider Linux and Solaris to be cousins from an administrative standpoint, then AIX is a 3rd- or 4th-cousin. Lots of things are different.
3. smit is my friend and helps deal with #2.
4. Virtualization on the IBM gear is powerful. And WAY complicated.
5. I keep hoping we'll change our mind and go back to Sun gear, but it's rather unlikely.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
If you create a complete solution, you can tune it for best performance, you can make it easier and cheaper to deploy, you can guarantee a certain level of quality, you can include a warranty, you can harden it in ways that software alone can't.
If you live in a SPARC/Solaris monoculture, things look just peachy! The Sun/SPARC/Solaris fanbois (most are crotchety old men to be sure) have no idea what the competition is doing.
do you even have a job? do you post from your mother's basement?
"Maybe the banks are buying P-series, but to replace Sun gear? I doubt it. More likely, they're replacing VAX and S/390 gear. (Yeah, still.)"
seriously.. this is based on... making stuff up?
For so many years we users have been fleeced by those vendors.
I'm betting that they looked at Apple's margins on hardware, and saw potential in doing the same with Sun's hardware business
A piece of hardware that could have been sold for $100 is being sold for $500.
A piece of software that could have been sold for $100 is being sold for $1000.
And the worst part is, although they sold us their wares with such high prices they never ever bother about the bugs.
We users are worse than guinea pigs. After we pay the high prices, we work for them for free reporting bugs to them so that later they can come up with a bug-fixed version and they can charge us again for it.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
sour grapes.
Seriously, when did Slashdot completely throw in the towel on objectivity?
Hell half of this story is true and it's STILL sour grapes with Sophistication and Jasmine Dressing. Come on
Last I heard from some of the insiders, the upcoming SPARC chip is shaping up to be very competitive - for the *first* time since UltraSPARC-I, it is rumored to hit the production on schedule, and meet the original performance target. This is unheard-of event for Sun in this century, so Oracle may actually make some money.
Are you freaking crazy? Sun's margins on hardware make Apple's margins look like small change. Having sold both in my career, there are retail margins of 8% on Apple hardware and anywhere up to 20-30% on Sun hardware. That's just the margins that the resellers make. Then there are the margins that Apple or Sun make themselves. Apple's are generally worked out to be around 30%, and I'd shit a brick of Sun's margins on hardware were anywhere less than this...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
I don't know if its me (I'm getting jaded and cynical in my old age) but I do keep wondering how Oracle's takeover will affect Sun's OS efforts.
The only reason I mention this is that there has been a noticeable (at least IMHO) change in VirtualBox development. Since the Oracle takeover, VirtualBox development seems to have changed direction or slowed down... I can't really put my finger on it but something noticeable has happened. I don't if the core devs have been affected/left or what.... but certain VirtualBox issues, issues you might think would be simple to fix, have remained unfixed for the last couple of months.
Again, I'm not too sure if Netbeans (I haven't used Netbeans for 6+ months) is affected.
Has anyone else noticed any shifts in Sun's OS offerings?
Your logic makes sense, until you realize that IBM offers a LOT more then Oracle does. IBM can be a total solution provider (including that problem of what to do with your cash) and will be more then happy to replace Oracle for you.
So I think it is the last. Oracle just doesn't have a clue. They are used to be seeing as the only professional database, so they don't really think in terms of competition. You don't really compare quotes on databases like you do with say webservers or NAS storage. Your IT guys will suggest Oracle and then that be the one you go for. It is an interesting position to be in for Oracle, to suddenly have a product to sell that people do compare with other offerings.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Everybody takes what's in the TFA for granted...
Do you frakkin' realize how big Java is? Java came out of nowhere, got pathetically badly marketed (Java applets gave Java the badest rep one can imagine and nearly totally ruined Java) and yet became the greatest language success story of these last 20 years.
The Real-World [TM] depends on Java. Every single tech-savvy company out there is high on Java: IBM, FedEx, Walmart, eBay, the whole frakkin banking world (both consumer and non-consumer banks), entire countries' medical care system, etc.
Oracle now owns both the DB and the software that powers the entire Real-World [TM]. And buy buying Sun, they made sure neither MS nor IBM nor Google (do you frakkin' realize how big Java is at Google?), nor, worse, Apple, wouldn't acquire Sun. Both Apple and MS would have killed Java (iPhone Java-optimized CPU yet no Java on the iPhone, no Java on the iPad...).
Oracle is now in a very comfy position to rule the Real-World [TM] even moreso than it already did.
Sun doesn't have any hardware anymore. They killed off most of the value in SPARC years ago. Solaris isn't going to win back the data center in any major way any time soon(if ever), and it's the only OS which really runs particularly well on SPARC. Intel has pretty much taken the general purpose CPU crown at this point and may very well stand alone in that arena by the time the economy comes back to normal.
The rest of SUN's supposed hardware is the same stuff everyone else distributes upmarket models of the same stuff that's in your home PC. The prices they charged were mostly for the software stack they sold with it and the support they provided. No different than Apple, IBM, HP, or anyone else for that matter anymore. There's no margin in specialized hardware unless it serves a specialized task, and in computing that basically leaves appliances and mainframes, neither of which is the kind of gold mine that would make all the hell Oracle went through to get SUN worthwhile.
As far as I can tell, Oracle bought SUN for two reasons. To try to turn some of Sun's great ideas into actual revenue generators and to stop anyone else from doing the same.
Let's face it, despite the fact that their managers couldn't find a profit to save their lives, Sun's R&D department has come up with some seriously cool stuff over the last decade or so. True their own implementations of their ideas have mostly sucked and the best implementations(and most of the money) have been made by other companies, but they're still good ideas. Oracle can squeeze blood from a stone when it comes to making money, and I'm sure they have some pretty exciting ideas on how to generate cash out of Sun's assets.
Even if they can't, they most likely couldn't afford to risk that IBM or one of their other competitors could. A lot of Oracle databases still run on SPARC and Solaris, and IBM and Oracle aren't exactly the best of friends.
I can't believe no-one has mentioned this yet. Oracle's Exadata2 solution uses Sun x4175 and x4275 servers, and runs on NO, not Solaris, but Oracle Enterprise Linux. (Which I believe is just a RedHat variant.)
Its my impression that Oracle bought Sun for the hardware, in order to deliver a one-stop-shop solution for Oracle clusters. The one-throat-to-choke model, if you will.
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/db/exadata/pdf/exadata-storage-technical-overview.pdf
slides 16, 17, 22, and 57. And that helpful link was provided by Scott Davenport's Sun blog at:
http://blogs.sun.com/sdaven/entry/oracle_exadata_2
One can only hope, in many ways Oracle is worse then Microsoft.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maybe they should reduce the eff'ing price model on their Oracle line and maybe, just maybe focus on the AIX version instead of leaving it last for support.
One only needs to pick up any copy of the Wall Street Journal from the past couple of months to know that Oracle bought Sun for the hardware. On the front page of every edition there is an advertisement comparing Sun and IBM hardware. "Sun 7 times the performance, IBM 6 times the power consumption."
As someone that has written code for solaris, bsd and linux kernels, I'll say this: linux is the worst platform to target when it comes to kernel development and bsd cannot touch solaris.
What makes Solaris so good? First, dtrace. Second, mdb and crash dumps (yes, that's right kids, on Solaris you can debug problems without the source and adding printk's.) Third, stable APIs.
The rate at which APIs change, incompatibly, within the Linux kernel means that it requires significantly more work to keep your code running on Linux. Of course nobody in the Linux camp cares about this - all they care about is "free" source code.
If I have any problems with my stuff on BSD or Linux, I try and reproduce it on Solaris because if it happens there too, at least I can analyze and debug the problem with much greater ease than on BSD/Linux.
It's unfortunate that the Linux kernel developer base is made up of so many hacks.
But consider this: if/when Linux finally kills Solaris, which operating system will BSD/Linux then copy for inspiration with new features? Will it be time to stop trying to be Solaris and be Windows? Or AIX? Or...?
Oracle's main product functions in a cluster quite well for normal business use. With 12 to 48 core chips in a single x86-64 processor, the advantage for scalability of the Sun kind (32 to 256 cores per machine) will disappear in the next year. The price/performance will favor 8 chip SMP x86-64 systems or clusters of them to run Oracle. UltraSparc is dead meat.
First of all, the Sparc 1 was pretty ancient 10 years ago. In 2000, Sun was barely even selling anything but sun4u based machines. I think they still sold a few sun4m machines like the sparc 20, but it certainly wasn't state of the art.
In 2000, the technical reason you bought Sun or SGI over a Pentium III running Linux was the I/O subsystem. There were also political reasons, like you wanted VC. Remember, that was the height of the dot-com bubble, and it looked better when they toured your office to have a bunch of Sun stuff in the server room.
Yes, The Pentium III could run Seti@home just as fast as a Sun, but there was no comparison in the I/O subsystem, which was, and still is, what most servers need to do fast. Linux hardware RAID support was spotty at best. LVM existed, but wasn't as good a clone of Solaris as it is today. This was also pre-HyperTransport. PC (Intel and AMD) bus technology was years behind Sun/DEC/SGI in those days, the CPUs were fast, but they couldn't get data to them fast enough.
More recently, all that has changed. Every RAID vendor supports Linux, and most do it well. PC busses designed for servers use similar architectures to older unix servers, and have ramped up the speeds (Intel hired all the DEC engineers). A "PC" based server, engineered by a company that knows what they're doing (ie not some gamer building a server optimized for FPS) can definitely compete with anything out there on the technical level, and it's got the backing of real vendors behind it, which is needed in a corporate environment.
You don't believe that he posed a theory accusing Jews of practicing selective breeding? He wrote an entire book on it! Why don't you go read his 1994 book called "A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy" ?
Summary (from Wiki): In this paper, MacDonald describes Judaism as having (or constituting) a "group evolutionary strategy" aimed to limit exogamy, enforce cultural segregation, promote in-group charity and economic cooperation, and regulate in-group marriage and births to achieve high levels of intelligence, resource acquisition ability, parenting care, and group allegiance. He examines evidence from Jewish history, culture, and genetics in support of his thesis, arguing that Judaism is based on a strong and possibly genetically based predisposition to ethnocentrism characteristic of Middle Eastern cultures generally but exacerbated as a result of selective effects resulting from Jewish cultural practices. He analyzes the use of the complex and extensive Jewish scriptures and the high prestige of Rabbinic learning as eugenic mechanisms for promoting Jewish verbal intelligence and dexterity.
Project caiman the installer? I don't follow.
Matt
SPARC hardware sucks by every measure.
performance per core - sucks
performance per watt - sucks
price per core - sucks
The only remotely competitive thing Sun used to sell was enterprise services.
Unless you have seen just how efficient the T5XXX series is with Java, I would not count the SPARC line out. Bad code is suddenly workable
Oracle now has a mirror to what IBM has had: An application tier (Weblogic) designed to run on a specific chip for maximum performance.
IBM has always had a DB to run on specific hardware, the Mainframe.
Now, if the next generation of SPARC (VIII) optimizes Oracle DB proper, you have a killer application stack: Optimized JAVA engine and Optimized DBA stack.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Group evolutionary strategy does not refer to a "conspiracy", nor even necessarily conscious behavior. He was writing about how Jewish culture and customs have facilitated the development of specific advantageous qualities.
Way to misrepresent the material. Next time try reading the book.
One problem, the next generation of sparc, VIIIfx, is designed by Fujitsu who might have totally non-Oracle goals in mind.
Now if you mean Niagra-3, haven't heard any recent news from Oracle about that.
Microsoft dropped the "database on raw partition" in 2005 as I recall, because the performance advantage was just a few percent even if your workload was totally disk-bound. Also, not having an actual file to move around, resize, etc was so inflexible that it just wasn't worth it. Finally, I'm sure a lot of idiot admins set this up, then had some other admin accidentally reformat the partition containing valuable data later on.
In business, always consider the exact opposite of what a company says. It is just as often that they are publicly saying exactly the opposite of what they intend. MySQL and Java are huge. Oracle would love, I suspect, to capitalize on MySQL. If I were a savvy developer, I would switch to postgreSQL right about now, becasue I see MySQL being neglected than abandoned so Oracle can extend its database business. Hardware, my butt.
Oracle wants to deliver turn-key systems.
Not a troll, just a valid opinion that some slashdotters didn't like!