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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.'"
Not for the lulz as I originally supposed.
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.
Ugh - make that "Oracle originally only made an offer for Sun's software assets.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Then what you want is FreeBSD, not Linux. FreeBSD has had DTrace for a few years now and ZFS support for a couple years in experimental mode. As of FreeBSD 8-Release, ZFS is now considered "Production Ready". We've been slowly moving the last of our Solaris stuff over to FreeBSD the past year even before ZFS was officially supported in the FBSD 7.x series.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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
Where did you hear that? I was working for Sun at the time, and there was nothing official about Oracle until after talks with IBM broke down. And then it was for the whole company. It's true that Sun restructured itself so that all the software businesses (minus Solaris, which was moved into the hardware division) could be sold. But there were no offers. The sad truth is that Sun's software initiatives generated tons of press (even people who don't know what "high level language" or "virtual machine" mean have heard of Java) but not much in the way of revenue.
This acquisition was never about software. People assumed it was, because software is all they know about Sun. But most of the revenue came from selling hardware. Buying Sun for the software is as silly as buying Oracle for Larry Ellison's yacht.
Isn't Sun's ridiculously overpriced and underpowered hardware the reason they went bankrupt?
Um, one, they never went bankrupt. They had billions in cash just sitting in the bank, in fact. Next, hardware wasn't why they declined. Hardware sales were keeping them afloat. There are three reasons they were declining:
1 - Software is one reason they declined... specifically, Linux software, as it did much of what Solaris did at no or lower cost. Windows was also cheaper when you considered the cost of the hardware it ran on.
2 - Leadership was non-existant, and the sales strategy was all over the place like an ADHD kid bouncing off the walls. "We'll push Java! It'll make us rich! No, we'll push network computers, it's the wave of the future! No, we'll compete at the low end by GPL'ing and giving away our software! No, we'll spend a billion dollars on a free database system, and then give THAT away! Riches will follow!"
3 - With this lack of focus, IBM attacked them from the top, and Microsoft from the bottom, squeezing them out of former markets
Larry Ellison has made what I think is a prudent decision; stick to the expensive, profitable high end, and quit giving your software away. Pump money into your hardware, as your latest CPU offerings compete very well on the high end with lots of servers, especially on performance per watt costs.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
How did this get modded up? I know that it... sounds like it makes sense, but it's the exact opposite of what actually goes on.
They're proving both quotes that 'real men build hardware" and that "real software lovers build hardware" from IBM and Apple.
Both IBM and Apple design Software and Hardware to complement each other. Compare an iSeries or iPad to the typical Oracle setup where they are at the mercy of Intel, AMD, Microsoft, IBM, etc to get their Database to work. Defining a basic Schema is full of so many tips and tricks compared to any other database
WTF? It's hard to define an Oracle schema because of a client's choice of instruction level compatible CPUs? Are you kidding me? I've never heard of anyone actually altering their database schema design to target it for either "Intel" or "AMD". That's insane.
. Sure, it's nice to choose the "optimum" setting for every single block of data... but wouldn't it be BETTER to simply format the hard drive the way you want it in the first place and to build the most critical functions directly into firmware?
First of all, it's quite possible to "format the disk" natively with Oracle's database files, bypassing the OS filesystem. Even Microsoft SQL Server can do that, it's just not advertised as a big feature. Yes, there are performance gains (I've heard up to 20% in some corner cases), but it's almost never worth it, because the downsides are enormous. Managing a LUN is much harder than managing a file. Either way, this can be done now. There's no reason for some sort of magic hardware support.
Second, somehow 'burning' Oracle in the firmware is neither going to make it faster, nor improve anything else. It'll just make it harder to patch and manage, and it'll mean that a future service pack may not fit into the limited flash space. I can't imagine too many deployments where the speed of the program storage is the limit. Even if it is, it's not like you can't boot-from-SAN or just buy an SSD for any old server now!
IBM stuff can do really neat things like split database writes in the disk controller and keep track of multiple copies at once on redundant systems.
Err.. you mean scatter-gather IO and synchronous mirroring? Ooo... fancy stuff, I bet nobody's ever managed to do that in software!
You just can't do that level of stuff with the tools Oracle or Microsoft has now.
Yes, you can. The differences between the major vendors at the "low level" have been tiny for years and years now. The real differences are at the high-level, pure-software layer. Features like RAC differentiate DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server from each other, not the RAID controllers.
Microsoft's sole existence is based on separation of hardware and software... so everybody squabbles between Intel/AMD, ATI/Nvidia, Oracle/MySQL, etc... and Microsoft gets rich playing "middleman" being the only party the others can legally talk to.
Are you kidding me? Since when is Intel some poor pauper holding out a begging bowl to Microsoft? Last time I looked, both Intel and Oracle had market capitalisations over USD 100 billion, and were 'legally allowed' to talk to each other.
There is already a company that makes a Sparc based blade for IBM BladeCenter chassis, drop it in an IBM Blade and share your SAN and have backplane-level network between the other hardware and OSes....this is what Oracle is after. Rather than keep playing games with other vendors, simply sell "Oracle" like IBM sells System i (iSeries). You would by an Oracle blade and simply connect that to your network. There's no point in loading multiple apps on hardware...
it's so cheap now versu
"The charge what the market will bear. You're just mad that you didn't think of that first."
The market will not bear this. Witness the rise of Linux. 10 years ago slashdot was a different place. If you dare say anything bad about Sun you would be modded into an oblivon similiar to bashing macs today. Solaris was God and linux was nice but a toy. Today bashing Solaris gives you mod karma.
This all changed 10 years ago because Sun charged $10,000 for a sparc 1 workstation and $1,000 more for each 128 meg module. At the same time 10 years ago a Redhat Linux 5.2 box from a generic pentium III could run circles around it for only $1,000. Why pay $25,000 for a SGI or sun workstation when a $1,500 could now outperform it! Gcc started to replace sun studio and java ides like netbeans and eclipse started taking over the $$$ borland Jbuilder and Visual C++. Database software is now finally catching up with postgreSQL. You can argue that mysql is getting better too I suppose. With the database software formally reserved to big iron we have no reason to use Solaris/Oracle except on all but the biggest data warehouses.
Vendors got greedy and monopolies and ogopolies created their own demise with cheap free solutions. Hostage with pricing can only go so far until alternatives become competition and customers will now be happy to jump ship.
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