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Dell and HP To Sell Oracle Operating Systems

Posted by Soulskill on from the cross-contamination dept.

angry tapir writes "Oracle has announced that rival hardware vendors Dell and Hewlett-Packard intend to certify and resell its Solaris and Enterprise Linux operating systems as well as Oracle VM on their x86 servers. The announcement 'demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness,' company co-president Charles Phillips said in a statement."

18 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Good by slaxative · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't see why they would not want to make their OS more readily available by allowing other hardware vendors to sell their OS. This makes good business sense.

    --
    This is not the penguin you're looking for.
  2. "Demonstrates..." by John+Whitley · · Score: 4, Insightful

    demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness...

    [Pause for evil laughter omitted]

    ...and will provide Dell and HP customers with new levels of support...

    1. Re:"Demonstrates..." by afabbro · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I really can't see much of a use for something like Oracle. Either you are writing a small/medium sized application where something like MySQL/PostGres would do just fine out of the box, without any modifications, or you are doing something really large, which you end up writing your own custom storage solution for, which does exactly only what you need it to do, and is very finely tuned.

      Perhaps, but most shops find it's cheaper to license Oracle, DB/2, etc. than to write their own storage system from scratch, particularly if they need high multiuser concurrency and MVCC.

      Even large and busy sites like CraigsList use MySQL and other free products to handle their data.

      Craigslist does not have to manage a very large single image database. The data that appears for San Francisco does not have to be in sync with the ads that appears for Chicago. I imagine all of the ads for San Francisco (probably their biggest city) could fit in memory for a MySQL database. It's just easily compressable text and ads are short. Also, they don't keep more than 7 days. Given those requirements, MySQL is easy.

      Facebook does not really use MySQL but rather MySQL they've rewritten to use as a backing store for their gazillion memcache servers.

      At the other end of the spectrum, Amazon and telcos use Oracle, primarily because they need one consistent data image everywhere. Banks, airlines, shipping companies, etc. use DB/2 on the mainframe or Oracle for the same reason. If Facebook misses a post or doesn't update your home page, who cares...if a bank allows a payment because it's not looking at an up-to-date view of an account or Amazon 500 copies of a book when it only has 450 in stock, that is a problem.

      Oracle also has better features for minimizing or eliminating downtime for maintenance, recovering from user errors, disaster recovery, etc. And frankly, Oracle performs better under high workloads and scales further owing to better design. For now.

      Oracle is overused perhaps but it (and DB/2) still do things the free versions don't. The free versions are catching up...Postgres is at about Oracle 7 or 8, depending on which feature you look at. I do think they'll eventually catch up, but it's silly to say there is no use for something like Oracle.

      BTW, what drives overuse of Oracle is not laziness or tradition but scaling down of big solutions. Company X develops solution Y for $GIANT_CUSTOMER. They then sell it to smaller customers but have only tested it on Oracle, so smaller customers use Oracle. Vertical integration dictates software (and to some extent hardware) architecture in many cases.

      --
      Advice: on VPS providers
    2. Re:"Demonstrates..." by Hylandr · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Oracle is a very real threat to the open source community or Commercial Linux vendors in general. They have been rebuilding the Unix cathedral with an old guard dominance of Unix knowledge and development. Try finding any information for free on their websites. Now couple that with vendor lock in...

      - Dan.

      --
      ~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
  3. Friend/ employee hates Oracle by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have a friend who works for Oracle. He's constantly bitching about them and their disorganization. He's trying to find someplace else to work, even if it's the Evil Microsoft. Wow. Must be really bad, if he's willing to do that!

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    1. Re:Friend/ employee hates Oracle by hoggoth · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Oracle swallowed up a company that acquired a company that bought a company that had a technology I needed to use. I called Oracle and tried to find someone, anyone, who knew anything about how I could purchase it. Nobody had ever heard of either the product or the company. Finally after hours of searching I found the entire thing available fully functional for download deep inside Oracle's labyrinth of twisty little web pages, all alike. The text had disclaimers that you had to purchase a license to use the software. I called back and tried to find someone, anyone, who would let me pay for the software. No luck. I'm testing it now, but I don't know if I can use it in production. Neither does anyone else.

      --
      - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)
    2. Re:Friend/ employee hates Oracle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What's the product? I could do some digging on the intranet and maybe come up with something...

    3. Re:Friend/ employee hates Oracle by CoreDump · · Score: 4, Funny

      So, you use Solaris? Me too. And looking at alternatives now. It's a shame really, as the most stable gear I've run has been Solaris on Sparc.

      --

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      Segmentation Fault ( core dumped )

    4. Re:Friend/ employee hates Oracle by hoggoth · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Solaris isn't what I was talking about, but yes, as it happens I run several file servers on Solaris. Best. System. Ever.

      --
      - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)
  4. Re:Hey, Dell by commodore64_love · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why?

    The Ubuntu laptop would end-up being more expensive (no subsidies from desktop adware or MSN). You're better off buying a cheaper, subsidized laptop with Windoze, and then wiping it with Ubuntu Linux.

    --
    "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  5. Oracle Managment by helix2301 · · Score: 2, Funny

    This is another example of great management by Oracle. They want to sell a server product so they team with HP and Dell this is a great move. This idea did wonders for Red Hat and Suse I hope it does the same for Oracle. Plus since HP and Dell already ship Linux I am sure they will be happy to ship Unix.

    --
    http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
  6. Re:Hey, Dell & HP! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It't not just Dell. I bought an HP dv8t Quad edition (core i7) for $2018.99 a few months back. After loading Linux on it, found out the ONLY way to update the BIOS is via Windows7. The ACPI in the BIOS that shipped with the laptop is severely broken, but because they have tied the BIOS update to the Windows 7 OS I have no way to update the system. I for one will NEVER buy another HP product again!

  7. Re:Oracle sucks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    To be fair, Sun was doing a fine job of flushing themselves down the toilet without Oracle's help. Oracle has just reached for the plunger...

  8. Re:Ubuntu Linux? by CannonballHead · · Score: 5, Informative

    That is not true. Granted, they don't have many but they do offer ... three... but that includes a desktop system with Ubuntu 10.04. Which was released pretty recently. Which means they are still actively doing stuff with Ubuntu over there at Dell.

  9. Re:Hey, Dell by CannonballHead · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, it's not many, but they do offer some Ubuntu systems.

  10. Re:never get used to this by Third+Position · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Don't worry - I suspect you will not have to hear things like that for long. Give it five years, and those products will likely have died a slow, lingering death under the stewardship of Oracle.

    --
    American Third Position
    Finally, a real choice!
  11. Re:Hey, Dell & HP! by Nadaka · · Score: 2, Interesting

    HP is horrific. Of the 5 or 6 HP computers that I have owned or have performed "family tech support" for, each and every one of them has failed within a month after the end of the warranty period.

    One of them was struck by lightning a month after I got it, it didn't matter that HP's warranty didn't cover it as an act of god because my surge protectors warranty definitely covered it. HP claimed that it was not struck by lightning, but instead someone had drenched it in soda, they offered to "fix it" at a cost higher than its original retail cost. I refused and demanded a refund, they refused and returned the disassembled laptop. I eventually got it mostly working again after soldering a few wires into the power plug that was scorched by electrical arcing... Until a month after the original warranty expired and it bricked itself.

  12. Re:Hey, Dell & HP! by T5 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Same deal with a Samsung netbook that I purchased because of its semi-ruggedness (NB30). Out of the box BIOS was junk (ACPI problems, as usual, manifested as dropping keystrokes due to odd, periodic, momentary machine stalls), and the BIOS updater runs only under Windows. You can't even run the BIOS package (.exe) on another machine and manually extract the BIOS - updater recognizes that it's on a different machine and refuses to run.

    Contacting Samsung was an exercise in futility. Tech support kept insisting I run the .exe and also told me that I needed to make sure that I installed the battery level monitor .exe beforehand. The tech support person could not grasp that I was running Linux, not Windows, despite my best efforts to persuade them otherwise. Unbelievable.

    My mistake was not making this a dual boot machine, just to keep Windows around for such work. It's become standard operating procedure for me now to dual boot any machine that's likely to need a BIOS update (Dell, to their credit, is not one of these vendors). And with the tendency of vendors not to include CD/DVD restore media, I'll have to use some other install media to reinstall Windows just to perform what should be a simple BIOS update.