Oracle To Increase Investment In SPARC and Solaris 146
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.
Re:The cool kids don't care (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like you haven't read this essay [catb.org] yet.
"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actually interesting would be information on the updated product roadmap, which is currently a bit sparse and extremely out of date.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: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.
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.
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
Re:easy statement to make - means next to nothing (Score:3, Informative)
SMP can be done more cost effectively
Bullshit. Say what you want about Sun, but noone does SMP more cost-effectively than they.
Re:The cool kids don't care (Score:1, Informative)
Solaris has no limit:
/* /*
* max_ncpus keeps the max cpus the system can have. Initially
* it's NCPU, but since most archs scan the devtree for cpus
* fairly early on during boot, the real max can be known before
* ncpus is set (useful for early NCPU based allocations).
*/
int max_ncpus = NCPU;
* platforms that set max_ncpus to maxiumum number of cpus that can be
* dynamically added will set boot_max_ncpus to the number of cpus found
* at device tree scan time during boot.
*/
int boot_max_ncpus = -1;
int boot_ncpus = -1;
Searching for NCPU [opensolaris.org] in the code, you can see that it is set by the CPU driver. Honestly, Solaris has been able to run on multiple architectures for years and the kernel is really not that big. To say that Solaris can't do something without trying it is just idiotic.
Re:The cool kids don't care (Score:1, Informative)
"Faster, cheaper, just as reliable."
*
Probably not. ZFS v. ext*, svcadmin v. init scripts, dtrace v. strace (wut?), crossbow v. a non-existent virt. networking schema in linux, solaris streams v. make the network app do the plumbing, etc. etc.
*
Apparently your job is to replace a superior, better-engineered Unix with something piecemeal. For all of our benefit, I hope opensolaris continues to develop such that its rough edges get filed off and we can have a viable alternative to things like RHEL.
-a friendly Linux platform engineer
Re:easy statement to make - means next to nothing (Score:1, Informative)
That is simply not true. Sun has long been criticized by analysts for spending too much on R&D. Most of their R&D goes into SPARC development. They spend a lot of money on SPARC because that's where the majority of their revenue comes from. I'm pretty sure it's in the billions. Maybe that is "low, almost nothing" to you.