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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."
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
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.
I work for a company that was one of Sun's top 5 customers [ergo, "Anonymous"]. When Oracle took over, we were greeted with the elimination of most of our bulk discounts and an admonition to no longer deal with VARs. Since then, we've begun an aggressive Linux implementation program. The purchase of new Sun-branded hardware, in my rather small working group alone, has gone from several hundred servers a year to zero. We have pallets of decommissioned T-series machines in storage awaiting a trip to the scrap yard. It's too bad, Sun was a great company. So was HP, years ago.
I can sum it up in one phrase: No. Hardware. Downtime. Ever.
VMWare's solution enables you to move production servers at will without ever halting execution. Any hardware upgrade/replacement will have zero downtime. Even a hardware failure can be automatically migrated away from before it takes down the server and fixed without any down time.
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?
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
I remember the first time I had a real hardware error on a Dell system running Linux. Straightforward enough, called out DIMM1. So I called Dell. They said "Oh, that doesn't necessarily mean a memory error. The way the PCI bus works that error could be on the bus itself, in the memory, or in the card in the first PCI slot. There's no way to tell".
Seriously? No way to tell what "Error in DIMM 1" means? That's what the guy insisted. His solution? Turn the computer off and reboot. If it crashes again, call him back.
This was on a Production database. No way was I going to just power off/on and wait for a follow up crash. I was used to sending Sun explorers and getting exact part numbers back for failures. If Dell couldn't do that, why were were playing this game?
Dell finally agreed to send a technician with all three parts so he could diagnose and we could solve it with one downtime instead of several. But as a long time Solaris guy, I was totally disgusted.
Sure, for edge servers, startups, small things, you can get away with that. But for business critical in Enterprise? I want better support from my vendor than "reboot and let us know if crashes again".
I definitely don't agree here. There is no x86 system that can beat SPARC today on *any* enterprise related workload, especially Database with same # CPUs or cores running the same SW. TPC-C benchmark shows SPARC T5-8 with #1 result and beats Oracle X2-8 by 6% perf/core. http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp. On SPECjEnterprise2010, http://www.spec.org/jEnterprise2010/results/jEnterprise2010.html ,SPARC T5 is ranked #1, #2, #3, #4 and #10 with Xeon in #6 position, and showing 32% perf/core better than Oracle X2-8. Even in SAP benchmark, SPARC is ranked #1, #2, #3, #5, #6 with Xeon showing up at #10.