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Comments: 146 +- Developers: Oracle To Increase Investment In SPARC and Solaris on Friday September 11, @08:48AM
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by
kdawson
on Friday September 11, @08:48AM
from the just-so's-you-know dept.
from the just-so's-you-know dept.
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An anonymous reader writes "The Slashdot community has recently questioned what Oracle will do with Sun hardware if and when Oracle's acquisition of Sun closes. And it seems that speculation about the future of SPARC hardware has been common among Slashdot commenters for years. That said, it seems newsworthy that Oracle is going out of their way with some aggressive marketing directed at IBM to state clearly their plans to put more money than Sun does now into SPARC and Solaris." MySQL is not mentioned in this ad, perhaps because (as Matt Asay speculates) the EU is looking closely into that aspect of the proposed acquisition.
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Oracle To Sell Sun's Hardware Business To HP? 76 comments
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Still going to sell out to HP (Score:2, Interesting)
I still expect the sale of the ex-sun hardware business to HP to go through, now Oracle have puffed up the price a bit.
Re:Still going to sell out to HP (Score:4, Insightful)
why would HP want it? They sold out their hardware folks for Intel's Itanium a long time ago... shut down Alpha, Vax, etc... it was gruesome.
Don't forget PA-RISC. Despite the fact that systems were still selling new in 2008, HP decided to follow-through and kill it off to make way for Itanium.
It's just pathetic that nobody has the balls to compete with Intel in the RAS space. Now we've spent the last 10 years seeing every single new Itanium core delayed, underpowered and overpriced. Now with 3 years still waiting for Tukwila, I expect that trend to continue.
Parent
Everything for the database (Score:5, Interesting)
The ad says that Oracle will aim for tight integration with its database. That might be less welcome news for those people who do not use it for Oracle databases.
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People don't complain when Cisco, Juniper, etc integrate their routing/switching/firewall features with ASICs.
Why should databases be different?
Given the hardware prices and wide interest in FIPS-type security requirements, Oracle might as well be selling appliances. It will come to this sooner or later.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
ha, ha silly rabbits...
AS400/iseries/system i... doing it for decades... laughing now.
Although you could include Vax and HP's E-series mini-computers as well in the "enterprise appliance" category.
The browser is the new "green screen".
easy statement to make - means next to nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun is so cash-strapped that investment in Sparc is at low, almost nothing. So it is easy for Oracle to claim they will outspend what Sun does now....all the while looking for a hardware company on which to dump Sparc off. There are plenty of alternatives to UltraSparc based Sun servers, redundancy and SMP can be done more cost effectively
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SMP can be done more cost effectively
Bullshit. Say what you want about Sun, but noone does SMP more cost-effectively than they.
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Can you say Fujitsu.. ..
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http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/03/30/fts_server_strategy/ [channelregister.co.uk]
They want to gravitate to where the growth is, and it just isn't SPARC.
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No comments about the European Union? THEY are the ones who will decide if Oracle and Sun merge, not us. It'll be interesting to see what happens if the EU says "no"
speculative investment until a buyer appears (Score:5, Insightful)
SPARC is dead (Score:2)
Who's buy SPARC these days? I don't know of anyone, and for similarly priced machines the X86/AMD boxes run circles around SPARC.
And Solaris is completely independent from chip architecture. SPARC Solaris and X86 Solaris are essentially identical, except for the boot architecture. Pretty much the same for the OpenSolaris fork, which is where all the new features are going. (GA, commercial Solaris is essentially a back-port of OpenSolaris, featurewise.)
In one of my old jobs we paid the premium for SPARC only
"More" means nothing.. what are the product plans? (Score:5, Informative)
Given how little money Sun had, and how many layoffs they were making and had in the works, for Oracle to invest "more" in Solaris/SPARC than Sun did alone wouldn't take much. What would be actually interesting would be information on the updated product roadmap, which is currently a bit sparse and extremely out of date.
SirWired
Re:"More" means nothing.. what are the product pla (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, but you gotta understand. Without Sun there's just IBM. There's no other vendor in the mainframe business, which is still big business. You don't think the IRS has time or money to manage the size of cluster they would need to operate effectively? So they rely on big iron, which is reliable and redundant and engineered to be that way over 40-50 years of experience. Clusters are garbage compared to a real mainframe. Sure, you have distributed filesystems now, and you can sort of split CPU around, there's management systems, etc, but all of this are ideas that come straight from the mainframe os which does all this "by itself". Google managed to make a pretty cool mainframe from commodity hardware but whatever.
Now, if you're not going to go with IBM for your database, you're probably going to go Oracle. But if you need big iron to run this huge database, you're going to have to go with IBM with z/OS and linux virtual machines or something. Oracle now has viable, proven mainframe line and all they have to do is throw money at it. They'll just move to selling complete packages instead of just DB at the mainframe level. With all this "cloud" bullshit (eg "Mainframe on the internet"), big businesses are interested in managed services and Mainframes have always been vendor managed.
Even IBM minis like AS/400 boxes come with full support from IBM. They monitor the box 24/7. I used to operate them long ago, and I remember that a disk went bad in one of our storage boxes (they had these giant enclosures with over 100 disks in them). Literally the message flashed on my console "SYS01281: DISK ERROR" blah blah blah and I turned around to get the binder to figure out what I had to do. By the time I turned back to my desk my phone was ringing and it was IBM support letting me know a tech would be there within 4 hours to replace the drive. Awesome.
So like, Sun/Oracle can do the same thing, and they can compete if they play their cards right. Oracle has poached a lot of high-end people from IBM in the past so this was only a matter of time.
Regarding MySql: MySql is a toy. Go to where the money is and you will find mainframes still. No one in their right mind would put anything important on MySql. Yeah yeah, facebook pft. If Facebook was making more than a few mil they would switch. Internet hits != money. (I'm talking Fortune 25 money, government money, world organization money, casino money, bank money). So I, for one, welcome Oracle and Sun back to this venue.
Parent
Re:"More" means nothing.. what are the product pla (Score:4, Insightful)
Oracle did not buy Sun for Java, and they certainly didn't buy it because Sun is profitable. Oracle purchased Sun because Oracles business is Database Solutions, and Sun just happens to have hardware and software IP that can make Oracles position better in that market.
Its really that simple. Oracle is not going to be throwing away Solaris, SPARC, or MySQL, because these are the very things that Oracle purchased Sun for.
Parent
What about HP? (Score:5, Insightful)
HP's Itanic... whoops!... Itanium boxes are in the same league as Sun's SPARC boxes and IBM's POWER products, so without Sun, IBM would not exactly be standing unchallenged. (That said, the PA-RISC to Itanic transition in HP admittedly did not go well...)
In addition, I would go so far as to say that Sun wasn't in the mainframe business either. They made really big UNIX boxes, but did not make mainframes. About the only other mainframe company that comes to mind is the Tandem (now HP) NonStop line of products. Unisys claims to make some, and there are a couple of other tiny players out there. But yeah, IBM pretty much had a mainframe monopoly before, and the still have one now.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
you need to do a few search engine queries before making such a silly statement. Even if you wanted to call Sun's big boxes "mainframes", which they aren't, there are over half a dozen big unix-iron companies. And there are several mainframe companies (of which Sun is NOT one)
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Linux runs on expensive highly available hardware too. Including real mainframes, which big Sun boxes aren't.
addition by subtraction (Score:2)
Fixed.
Mouth building bridge ass can't cross (Score:2)
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With so little overlap with OS and hardware as Oracle did next to nothing with an OS and no hardware at all, I doubt they got rid of many, if any, of those in Sun that are accustomed to managing and selling high end hardware and software. On top of that, Oracle knows how to sell very expensive bits.
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I don't see the connection... (Score:5, Interesting)
Would promising to maintain or increase the investment into MySQL actually smooth things over with the EU?... If I were an Oracle exec, I would strongly encourage support for MySQL as a way to keep people away from PostgreSQL. Articles like this [cnet.com] show that PostgreSQL has a lot more potential to win over Oracle customers than MySQL does.
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The MySQL issue looks like a red herring to me, although I suspect it's a wonderful source of FUD for anyone who wants to delay the deal.
The Wall Street Journal actually noticed the elephant in the room: MySQL is free software, and can't be shut down by an evil monopolist (like one we all know and love).
They seem to think the EC wants a (symbolic?) divestment ..
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574390512306888466.html?mod=googlenews_wsj [wsj.com]
As for me, I want the deal to go through so
CoolThreads Desktop (Score:2)
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Sun's Niagara line is better for databases... (Score:5, Insightful)
.... Their threaded design provides more threads and cores per Watt than other processors, and designs under development is pushing the further in that direction. And at this point, I am not aware of any Linux distribution that supports Niagara (though there may very well be one).
Databases do not benefit as much by fast single thread execution as they do by very reasonable multi-thread execution. That is because in a database application, or Web application, you want to support many sessions.
And as power and heat become issues in large server farms (mostly running database and web applications), the Niagara line is attractive.... The problem hasn't really been Sun's technology, but Sun's marketing and unfocused management. Larry might be a jerk, but he does know how to focus on making money.
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Re:Sun's Niagara line is better for databases... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really true, and it's why most people haven't bought into Niagara despite any benchmarks Sun might come up with. The problem is that Niagara doesn't have the single threaded performance to start with. Rock was what was necessary, but that seems to be stillborne. For Niagara to work for you you have to have a lot of extremely lightweight threads that don't depend on each other and can run completely in parallel. You won't find many workloads like that these days, even with databases, because everyone has ever larger single jobs for specific tasks that they want to run faster and faster as well as potentially large stored procedures to mangle through. No one wants to find out that their hardware platform is OK for a specific workload and then as soon as you throw it something different it nosedives.
Parent
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Yes they are concerns, but people aren't going to go for that at the expense of potentially less performance, unless they plan their workloads very, very, very carefully. Few will. I've heard of some organisations who've went for these machines as J2EE or database machines who've had to allocate a lot more hardware than they planned which doesn't match up
What about rock? (Score:2)
I really hope this means they are going to pursue Rock aggressively. Knockin' on wood over here...
MARIA (Score:2)
but I've yet to hear MySQL's customer base, which skews toward the technology-savvy Web crowd, fretting about Oracle's impact on MySQL's business.
Could this be a non-issue due to that they can just fall back on Monty's MariaDB [askmonty.org]? ( community developed, stable, and always Free branch of MySQL )
Openoffice? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a Linux-on-desktop user, I am dependent on it. It is a critical ap for me.
OpenOffice could finally break the hegemony of MS Office, if it's not screwed up. I know a few people who are now using it on Windows, by choice, not necessity. But if it's screwed up, it's over.
I hope Ellison sees this as his chance to really stick it to Microsoft. I hope he retains and rewards the existing development team, and starts cleaning and optimizing the existing code base, and if needed dedicates additional manpower and resources. I hope Oracle's capable of doing this without screwing it up.
Sturggling with how they'll pay for it (Score:3, Insightful)
It is called a targeted ad (Score:2)
There is this thing called targeted advertising. One makes an ad targeted to a specific demographic. This ad is targeted specifically at companies using Sun hardware and Solaris.
It does not mention MySql because the ad is not targeted at MySQL users. Granted, the set of "Sun hardware and Solaris users" and the set of "MySQL" users can and probably do overlap, but that is beside the point.
Remember, lack of evidence for something (no mention of MySQL in that ad) is not evidence against said thing nor is it ev
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"cool kids"?
Wow. You need to get out more often! :-)
Re:The cool kids don't care (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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OK, that fits.
Re:The cool kids don't care (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like you haven't read this essay [catb.org] yet.
Parent
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...yes 'the state it's in": the reference platform for Oracle.
It's always good to have more people at the party. Hardware that
is specialized for heavy workloads is a good an useful thing and
not something that can be abandoned. It's always a bad idea to
only have one option.
Re:The cool kids don't care (Score:5, Informative)
Not true [google.com]
While only 1 of the top 500 is running OpenSolaris (and it's using 2.6Ghz Opterons), still, there is nothing inherently unscalable about Solaris or SPARC. I've personally been logged into a 96 core Sparc machine running Solaris 9 and Oracle 10.
Parent
Re:The cool kids don't care (Score:4, Informative)
If you're talking about single machine SMP, Solaris will go to 256 way SMP on available machines from Sun. Linux can do 1024-way Itanium2. With NUMA architecture things can get even bigger
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
probably nuggets of insight are better than incite.
256 cores 512 threads is the last limit I saw published by Sun. Please let me know of any bigger claimed value.
in the real world, the biggest machine that can be bought does put a limit on scalability for any business application. I don't see Sun machines leading in real world benchmarks of common business apps either.
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You're saying that Linux is 100% better because it can run on something that is exceedingly rare? Perhaps you might want to try considering some more run-of-the-mill use cases, such as those one run into in any data center and not just Los Alamos's. You know, things like serving, database server, backup server, storage and so on.
Re:The cool kids don't care (Score:4, Interesting)
but Linux does all those things - part of my job is replacing Sun servers with Oracle RAC clusters on Linux. Faster, cheaper, just as reliable.
Parent
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the application tiers I deal are J2EE servers and other middleware and web servers, so at least for those cases no real advantage to one big machine.
x86 is fast catching up, the six core by 8 processors are out now and soon 8x8 also with hyperthreading, that's going to eat much of the lunch of the traditional unix big-iron realm, as most partitionable machines are carved into that space or below.
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At the DB tier, OK fine, what about the Application tier? There are many enerprise applications that can really benefit from having 8 core chips that can do 8 threads/core. There is some level of efficiency in being able to push 256 threads in a 4U chassis.
We've recently made the decision to purchase those boxes for use as weblogic servers. The performance sucks. We have had to allocate almost twice the planned hardware to handle our existing loads; and are actually looking to move right back off of that platform with the next tech refresh.
Unfortunately, this is pure anecdote - I don't have any numbers to back this up, I just know the gist of what's been happening since we "upgraded" to SPARC. I can't even tell you the machines that we migrated away from.
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