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Five Years After the Sun Merger, Oracle Says It's Fully Committed To SPARC
jfruh (300774) writes "Sun Microsystems vanished into Oracle's maw five years ago this month, and you could be forgiven for thinking that some iconic Sun products, like SPARC chips, had been cast aside in the merger. But Oracle claims that the SPARC roadmap is moving forward more quickly than it did under Sun, and while the number of SPARC systems sold has dropped dramatically (from 66,000 in Q1 '03 to 7,000 in Q1 '14), the systems that are being sold are fully customized and much more profitable for the company."
If it wasn't for that the price of the hardware can often be close to ten times higher than the equivalent x86 machine.
While reading TFA, my big question was if the Sparc has been improved so much, is Oracle using it in their systems?
According to Wikipedia, Oracle has 122k employees; how many of them are running Sparc systems, how many of their internal servers are Sparcs? For a corporation of this size, I would expect, in three months, for them to consume a lot more than the 7k systems that were shipped in the latest quarter.
When I was at IBM, the company was very proud to be its own best customer; is that true for Oracle?
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
... VMWare is only committed to "commodity processors", namely x86, and I believe this is what doomed SPARC. I was a staunch Solaris admin/advocate and still love the hardware. However, Sun's virtualization does not hold a candle to VMWare. vmotion, storage vmotion, DRS and FT completely changed my life as a sysadmin. So at this point Sun hardware is not very useful to me in a datacenter. It is too bad because it was great.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
My suggestion to Oracle: Get SPARC's marketshare up. This might take some doing, but long term, expanding the ecosystem is a good way to keep revenue coming in, where customers buy new machines to upgrade, as opposed to "upgrading" to commodity x86 hardware.
This would require some work on the whole stack from the CPU on up to applications. For example, getting Solaris LDOMs and domains to work with SCVMM or the enterprise admin tool of choice. Another would be getting Linux applications to work on Solaris with low to minimal porting necessary. IBM did this with AIX starting at 5L (where it took a code recompile, but little else.)
As I mentioned before, Oracle has some pretty nice technologies which can shake up the market. SPARC servers have Infiniband, so if Oracle does some work with the hypervisor to allow one machine to access another box's disks via Infiniband, add redundancy (on both drives and nodes), this would completely get rid of a need for a SAN backend. Need more storage? Just add more drives to one of the machines, or add another node to the cluster, similar to how Isilons are updated. ZFS is also a crown jewel, and can be used for a lot of things as well, especially backend deduplication.
I hope Oracle can reinvent itself. They have a lot of core technologies that they could use to eke out a definite niche in the enterprise. Combine that with the fact that SPARC and Solaris are mature technologies, and Oracle can bring to the table pretty decent security.
Build 'em all by hand. A labor of love they say. Well, they say that because I make love to them when they're complete. But that's how I test them for the customer.
I'm glad that each system now makes more money for Oracle, I knew there was a reason for buying Sun/Oracle gear, it makes them richer.
Just for a moment I thought there might be a reason *for me*.
Dominic Connor,Quant Headhunter
That's not how Oracle makes money. They buy popular but less profitable companies, and then jack up the prices on their product until everyone finally migrates to other systems. Once they've driven away all the customers of the acquired company, they buy another popular but unprofitable company and repeat.
Intel has 64bit now, and killer GHz to boot. What does SPARC do for me, for instance if I'm running 500 web application servers or a big database?
Lot of talk about number of cores, and cache sizes, but what is the actual performance compared to intel's chips ?
I would expect Oracle to follow a similar pathway, sticking with Intel hardware for its employees. I would not expect them to ditch M$-Windoze; unlike IBM, Oracle doesn't have a long acrimonious love-hate history going with M$.
Wow. How the might have fallen.
Is "totally committed" the same as "100% committed" in business speak? I think they both mean "We'll do whatever it takes to keep the most money rolling in." But that's probably cynical, as the operators of corporations have nothing but the kindest of motives towards their customers in their generous hearts.
That is all.
It reminds me of how much Intel is committed to Itanium.
I'll rush out and confidently buy some of each.
Don't fall for it!
Oracle exsanguinates all that it acquires.
If you're not giving at least 110%, you could be giving more, right?
I fully agree w/ this. Oracle can have a whole range of SPARC based systems. High end can be based on Solaris, and mid to low end sytems can be based either on Linux or on the BSDs. That would enable Sun to segment the market, and prevent any one segment from cannibalizing the other.
If you examine the top two best performing database platforms (as benchmarked by TPC-C score) you will discover that they are both sold by Oracle, and that the SPARC version has both higher performance and a lower cost per transaction than the x86-64 version.
You might find this quote to be particularly interesting:
AIX 5L+? Minimal porting? You've very obviously never actually done it.
The total extent of IBM's efforts with AIX 5L was to put RPM 3.0.3 on their systems and build a few RPMs. The underlying source base for your RPM better support AIX or you're in for a good deal of fun. And you know what? Pretty much everybody dropped AIX support years ago for, I might add, very good reasons. AIX is a Unix, but a seriously weird one. Oh, and by the way, can you guess the version of RPM shipped with the latest AIX? Clue: it begins with 3. Check out the versions of packages at http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/aix/linux/toolbox/alpha.html. Most/all are seriously old. Many are a decade or more out of date.
As someone who has to deal with targeting AIX (as well as Linux), from my developer PoV AIX is dead, dead, dead. And starting to smell very very badly.
Meanwhile, Oracle have something like, what, 28k system sales per anum on which to amortize the cost of SPARC development? Pity. I loved old Sun kit, but sorry, SPARC is walking dead too. Just like AIX and POWER.
That uses 1 watt.
That's not the only way Oracle makes money.
They also get companies to sign unreasonable contracts, then six months later 'hire away' the deal maker for 5-10x previous salary for a zero responsibility marketing job that lasts a few years.
If you ever see that pattern on a resume _run away_. Not only is the person crooked, they can't manage money. The job should have left them set for life. Some are so greedy they try to leverage the salary history.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
But IBM has done what Oracle hasn't - port RHEL to Power, and re-brand it the p-Series. It maintains that distro as its own, since it's a different (non-x64) platform. Oracle could have done the same - port OEL to SPARC, and they'd have had the advantage of RHEL doing the development, and themselves just having to recompile and then finetune it to SPARC
The only thing Oracle commits to is squeezing their hostag- err customers for as much money as they can get.
They purchased Sun with the idea that they could sell you not only a software stack that you get addicted too, but an entire vertically integrated proprietary vice to clamp your nuts in.
Judging by the way Oracle has treated the other assets they slurped up from Sun, I really don't buy the marketing drivel about Sparc. "100% committed" is weasel language that effectively means nothing.
I remember Sparc. And Nixon.
I worked at an Sun Micosystems shop. We bought thousands of their servers yearly and these wren't just cheap system, but the big E-class stuff for $500K-$3M each. The people were good to work with, the hardware lasted just a little longer than we wanted, and Sun was a nice company for the F/LOSS world.
Then IBM offered a better golf deal to the CxO at that place and we were directed overnight to buy IBM whenever possible. The P-class stuff was cheaper than Sun's and AIX wasn't hard to use - we ran Sun, IBM, HP, and a few other systems - not a big deal.
After a year, Sun came back with new architectures that added many more cores for next to nothing extra power. We went through a huge modernization effort to free up physical space in all our data centers and deployed virtualized servers as a default. It was fairly routine to swap 1 physical box for 10-20 older boxes. Nice.
Then Oracle bought Sun and started the marketing takeover. Engineers know what I'm saying (VMware/EMC are similar). Then Oracle started behaving badly in the F/LOSS world, killed a few projects and started to stink up a few other projects.
Never pay Oracle for anything except a DBMS - Oracle. Don't get consulting, and run, run, run away from their enterprise software stuff. Anyone who has been through 2-3 yrs of attempted deployments for these white elephants knows why. You will be sold the impossible and it will never be completed. At $300/hr per consultant, they will bleed your budget until you can find a scapegoat to fire, thus saving your own career.
For us, the writing was clear - only buy Oracle HW when absolutely necessary and reduce our dependence on their DBMS to about 10% of our DBs. Go with Linux and x86 hardware whenever possible and use postgres for the DB unless really needed so there was real competition.
What do other customers say?
We stopped buying Sparc gear when Oracle took over. We figured that if dealing with Sun was Hell, dealing with Oracle would be another Circle of Hell entirely.
RIP SPARC.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
It's up to the vendor to assemble and benchmark a database platform for TPC.
Software licensing for most database servers explicitly prohibit benchmarking, meaning all scores must be released by the vendor. IBM likely has seen fit not to, for reasons of their own.
I do agree that AIX does stand for "Alien Interpretation of UNIX", but even though it is squirrely, if an application runs on it, it runs well.
I am not disagreeing with the fact that AIX and Solaris are bit players. However, I would say that one problem is that both Oracle and IBM at best are focused on retaining existing customers. Neither have any marketing focus on getting people from VMWare and OpenStack onto their platforms. And without expanding the market, just as the parent stated if the market isn't growing, it is shrinking.
This is a hard thing to do. The trend has been for businesses to have projects to get off of SPARC and POWER onto commodity x86 hardware, because x86 hardware has a price advantage, and can be sourced from a number of vendors. Both IBM and Oracle will have to have a good reason (good as in financially appealing), but it could be done.
There is the security aspect. Solaris and AIX have long since went through their teething problems when it comes to security and are quite robust in this regard. Solaris has tossed root (as a user) in Solaris 11, and uses roles (this functionality can be reversed if needed), and AIX can run completely root-less, as well as use signed executables/libraries/scripts. If Oracle could put some R&D into security... and a reasonable way to manage/audit things, they might just gain some ground back.
However, it would have to be a -major- improvement in security features, beyond the delta from Solaris 1.x to 2.x, something as major as the jump from Windows 3.1 to NT. Plus, it isn't just features, it is ease of implementation. Something where Solaris can be marketed as, "if it runs on this OS, it is secure".
What might have to happen is that Oracle might have to license things from Microsoft. Exchange and Active Directory come to mind. This way, even if there is a major Windows exploit, core AD servers would still be protected because they would be running on Solaris. It is doubtful MS would license this, and it would take some coding by Oracle... but it is going to take a Herculean effort to get SPARC's marketshare to grow again anyway, so might as well try to get businesses to move to the platform by offering an alternative to a Windows backend.
A more telling stat was that in Q1 2003, Sun shipped 66,000 Sparc units, most of them Sun Fire servers, the commodity line. In Q3 of 2014, that number was down to no more than 7,000 units in the quarter. But he notes that while Oracle's unit sales are down, the devices it sells are very high-end and are fully configured and integrated with compute, storage, networking and software completely integrated.
That isn't a refutation of the claim that Sparc is dying, it's just an explanation of how it happens.
Sparc users are the same as any other group, the exodus starts with the fringe and then moves to the core. Casual low-profit customers found it easy to switch platforms so left a long time ago. The big high profit customers have high loyalty and massive sunk costs, it's hard for them to switch platforms so they'll be the last to go. If Sparc is dying then that's exactly the pattern I'd expect it to follow.
I stole this Sig
>My suggestion to Oracle: Get SPARC's marketshare up.
LOL, in your dreams. Not even AMD can pull together good enough process technology and processor designs to compete with Intel and they have the advantage of full x86 compatibility. The sad remnants of Sun would get totally obliterated if they went into the ring against Intel
Hard to believe as I have 3500+ AIX servers with 5000+ lpars on them. As always the market changes, I personally hope IBM's massive price reductions and performance on the hardware spur some new interest. The only servers in my centers that never fall down are the AIX servers and zOS. I have Suse, redhat, MS.., z, servers, vmware, dedicated, just a lot of stuff. Z never goes down and AIX has about 99.99999 uptime here. I can't say that for any of the other hardware servers, dell, hp, etc. Its not cheap but not a disappointment either.
We are trying to put more on linux but the vmware costs keep jumping in there.
Lol. I'm _sure_ that Oracle didn't _at all_ heavily optimize for Sparc, right?
Oracle says a lot of things.
They inflicted Fusion on my employer, and not a single claim about it has turned out to be true.
Solaris/SPARC is still going strong in large companies. One of the greatest advantages it has is that Oracle creates and supports the operating system, and Oracle creates and supports the hardware. (If you're running an Oracle database or some other piece of software, then that's an additional component that they create and support.) What this means is that if I'm having a problem, mundane or esoteric, I can go to one vendor and say, "Fix it." There isn't any bickering about what company's problem it is, and who manufactured my RAM, or any other the other silliness that crops up in vendor support. Large companies value this (as do us sysadmins). That also means they can do some very cool software tricks (which I'll mention a few here below).
The decreasing unit shipments is just as much a sign of virtualization as anything. Right now, I'm looking at an older T5240, with two eight-core CPUs which presents itself as having 128 virtual CPUs (execution engines or thread engines), and 64gb of RAM. This is by no means the biggest box on the floor. We carve these up into smaller systems using either Solaris Zones, or LDOMs. That's two different methods of virtualization with two different goals.
I did something great with an LDOM last week. I took a virtual server that was on the box and migrated the entire operating system and all the applications over to another LDOM... WHILE IT WAS STILL RUNNING. Aside from a quick (1 second) pause, the applications on the server had no idea that it just migrated to another piece of hardware while it continued to run. Slick! The original server had a failing DIMM. No worries, though even aside from ECC, the operating system automatically mapped out which parts of the DIMM were defective and retired the pages of memory so that they weren't constantly being exercised. Linux does all that... right? No?
Someone else, above, said, "I don't think you can have a zfs system fail and move it to different hardware like you can with vmware...". Nevermind that we can migrate a running operating system and application to another piece of hardware and keep it running. Yes, of course if you have a hardware fault, you can bring it back up on another machine. The virtualization with Solaris is quite capable.
In the environment of a large company where we're competing against Linux on the low-cost end of things, Solaris/SPARC is not only holding its own, but actually beating our Linux cloud counterparts in the costs of a virtualized OS/hardware. (I should ask my boss if we can publish a paper on this, because it is rather impressive.)
On the high end of things, we completely dominate. We generally use a T5-4 for our internal cloud (which really isn't the biggest Oracle server out there). It has 64 cores, presenting 512 execution threads to the scheduler. RAM goes up to 2TB. If someone starts out on a tiny box with only one CPU and 4gb of RAM, we can scale them all the way up to the top by increasing their virtualization settings. No migrating to different or unusual hardware. If an application team can't scale their code horizontally (hey, it happens), they can go way vertical in this configuration. We haven't had a need yet for an M6-32 (32tb of RAM, and 32 of the 12-core CPUs (3072 execution threads or "virtual cpus"). We have Linux surrounded (on the low-cost side and the high-performance side) in a large enterprise environment, and that's why Solaris is still there.
Now, I'm not an Oracle salesperson. But if Slashdot ever did an AMA with an Oracle sales engineer, I think my fellow Linux admins would be particular impressed on how far ahead Oracle/SPARC is in a number of key areas.
Or maybe "Heritage"?
When I was in charge of managing UNIX servers, I don't recall ever having major issues with any of the AIX boxes (running AIX 7.1 and 6.1). However, the i-series box (IBM i 7.1 IIRC correctly) liked to lock out any user anything similar to the rights of QSECOFR on a regular basis, and I got plenty of use out of the 5250 emulation on the HMC.
I also had quite a few issues with one of my two HP-UX systems (HP-UX 11iv3 on Itanium, the HP-UX 11 on RISC I don't think anyone ever used).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Intel insisted they were "committed" to Itanium for a lot of years after that horse died, too.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Is anybody else "fully committed" to SPARC hardware, or even committed at all?
Marketshare means many things to many people. Unfortunately analysts look at just revenue and units which doesn’t show the full story. You can have all the revenue in the world and still be unsuccessful if you can't turn that revenue into margin and profit, which eventually goes into R&D for the future. Just ask Dell, HP and even IBM as they're all going through MASSIVE re-organizations, from Dell having to go private, to HP splitting company in half to IBM selling off its *highest revenue* x86 server business to Lenovo. They’ve all had #1 marketshare in servers yet they’ve all suffered. Look at their business and see how they are all reporting significant revenue (and profit/margin) declines. So while marketshare is important, look at the company financials and whether they are making any profit/margin to continue that business.
If you look at Oracle, Oracle has continued to show revenue growth and especially good margin & profit and why its investing so heavily in R&D which clearly benefits its customers. Sure, SPARC volumes and revenues have declined up until a few quarters ago, and that’s only because Oracle has eliminated all the non competitive systems and is now focused on this new trend of converged/integrated/engineered systems. Oracles HW marketshare in this new category is #1 -the new category of "systems" and not just "servers" called the "Worldwide Integrated Infrastructure and Platforms" with its Engineered Systems, where SPARC is an important part of it. You can see latest report here: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25347414
And as this market is dramatically growing, estimated at over $10BN this year (was $7.6BN for 2013 http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24831714), quickly surpassing the "Unix/RISC" market which is clearly declining. Oracle's Engineered Systems while not necessarily inexpensive is showing that you can actually save money by consolidating not just servers, but storage and networking and have Oracle assemble and optimize/engineer it all for you so you don't have to build it yourself. Kind of like buying an exotic car instead of building a kit car.
I think the challenge for Oracle with SPARC is that unlike the x86 world, where theres been a 5%-30% increase in processor performance every 12-18 months or so for last 5+ years, Oracle SPARC, in the past 5 years has delivered roughly a 2x gain every 1-2 years at roughly same price points, so they have to sell 5x more systems for same revenue as previously to maintain same revenue #'s as 5 years ago.
If you look at the performance gains from the SPARC T3 (introed late 2010) to the SPARC T5 (early 2013) CPU, theres roughly a 3x gain in delivered performance (SPARC T3-4 did 9,456.28 EJOPs on SPECjEnterprise2010 vs SPARC T5 with same 64-cores did 27,843.57 EJOPs) so now customers can buy 1 system that does the work of 3 systems just 2 years previously. SPARC T5 is easily 2x faster than SPARC T4 just a year previously. And compared to the fastest Sun based M9000-64 right before Oracle acquisition in 2010, which was a ~$3-4M system fully loaded, can easily be replaced in performance by a SPARC T5-4 today at less than $150K, and that’s with 16 x fewer CPUs, 192 x fewer cores and almost 5x better price/performance ratio! So maintaining revenue is clearly a challenge both on HW and SW. Just look at the license cost savings of 192 fewer cores!
But, if you do look at the latest IDC(or Gartner) marketshare reports, SPARC is either gaining share (since the SPARC T5), and has gained marketshare.
For example, according to IDC's most recent Q3 CY2014 server tracker report, in the price band of $25K-$1M, running Unix or Linux, where most of SPARC servers are priced, SPARC grew by 12.1% Y/Y, and share increased from 27.6% to 30.2% in the Q3 CY2014 quarter (Y/Y)
In previous IDC Q2 CY2014 server tracker, in the price band of $25K-$1M, running Unix or Linux, SPARC grew by 24.6% Y/Y, and share increased from 28.7% to 38.1% in the Q2 CY 2014 quarter (Y/Y)
And in the 1st Qtr of 2014, SPARC grew by 5.3% Y/Y, and share increased from 21.1% to 25.7% in the C1Q14(Y/Y)
So for 2014, when SPARC T5 servers were shipping, along with SPARC M6 servers, Oracle is showing marketshare gains.
The question of the time is what does an Oracle employee do when installing Java? Do they install or not install the 3rd party packaged application in the Java installer.
How many Oracle employees are running the Ask.com toolbar?
If an Oracle consultant is installing Java onto a customer's computer what do they select?
It is a running joke that the java update is sometimes just an update for the 3rd party application. I am glad we don't use the java platform because I would feel sad to have customers install java and end up with unwanted software which could negatively impact the reputation of other java applications.
Or, lack thereof. We only have three Suns left, and we do our best to convince people not to buy any more. Their default warranties are short, as opposed to Dell's and HP's; dealing with their tech support I refer to as self-abuse (I once spent a month to get a tech out to replace a motherboard, and that includes being assigned an engineer in Chile (I'm in the States), an engineer in the States... who was third shift *only*, and, oh, yes, three days in a row, three separate managers "taking ownership" when I escalated the issue.
As a comparison, Dell, after me running tests for them, had a tech out in 2 weeks, and the *one* manager who took ownership... about three or four months later, we had an issue on another system, and that *same* manager still felt ownership, and contacted *me* to see if I needed more help.
Overpriced, and not worth paying for Larry's fighter jet and Hawaiian island.
mark
"and while the number of SPARC systems sold has dropped dramatically (from 66,000 in Q1 '03 to 7,000 in Q1 '14), the systems that are being sold are fully customized and much more profitable for the company."
Evidence for this statement? There are a lot fewer customization available from Oracle compared to the old Sun store. And where are the evidence for a higher profitability?