Dell and HP To Sell Oracle Operating Systems

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."

Comments

Good

[slaxative]

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.

"Demonstrates..."

[John Whitley]

demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness...

[Pause for evil laughter omitted]

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

Re:"Demonstrates..."

[afabbro]

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.

Re:"Demonstrates..."

[Hylandr]

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.

Friend/ employee hates Oracle

[commodore64_love]

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!

Re:Friend/ employee hates Oracle

[hoggoth]

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.

Re:Friend/ employee hates Oracle

[CoreDump]

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.

Re:Hey, Dell

[commodore64_love]

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.

Re:Hey, Dell & HP!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Ubuntu Linux?

[CannonballHead]

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.

Re:never get used to this

[Third Position]

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.