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Five Years After the Sun Merger, Oracle Says It's Fully Committed To SPARC

Posted by timothy on from the wish-they'd-bring-back-the-sun-name dept.

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."

6 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. I'd love to buy some sparc hardware by kthreadd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If it wasn't for that the price of the hardware can often be close to ten times higher than the equivalent x86 machine.

  2. Unfortunately... by dfn5 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... 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.
    1. Re:Unfortunately... by linuxrocks123 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Why would you use virtualization in such an environment? Not trying to be argumentative, but it doesn't seem like virtualizing a bunch of database servers would be that big a win. So many people post here about virtualization that I'd like to know what they find so useful about it.

      I personally just don't like the concept of adding a layer between the OS and the hardware. The OS is supposed to handle running different programs and providing the environment they need to run. If it's not, fix the OS, don't just add another layer and take the associated performance hit.

      --
      vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
  3. "each system is more profitable for Oracle" by DCFC · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  4. Re:My suggestion to Oracle: SPARC everywhere... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Not so. by emil · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If I want Oracle PL/SQL in Postgres, I have to purchase EnterpriseDB. If you can get EnterpriseDB to give away the "deep Oracle compatibility" for free, many Oracle installations might switch. Let me know how that works out for you.

    I'd also like to see PostgreSQL in the TPC-C top ten. That's a lot of work, and for people who need scalability, they don't have time to wait.