Oracle To Increase Investment In SPARC and Solaris

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

[Philip K Dickhead]

"cool kids"?

Wow. You need to get out more often! :-)

easy statement to make - means next to nothing

[rubycodez]

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

speculative investment until a buyer appears

[petes_PoV]

If they didn't invest in SPARC/Solaris, all their potential customers would run - probably to the very competitors who are likely to buy that part of the business. However, by putting in a small amount of cash, they can appear to be keeping those lines alive, thereby making them worth selling. If they didn't, the brands would die within a year and the money spent on their valuation / acquisition, would have been wasted. So this way, a small amount gambled now could lead to a bigger payback when the business is sold off. Simples.

Sun's Niagara line is better for databases...

[paulsnx2]

.... 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.

Re:"More" means nothing.. what are the product pla

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to know what you're talking about, but do you live in an alternate universe where Fujitsu and HP don't exist?

Re:The cool kids don't care

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

So you're just a biased troll. Who else would use "Oracle RAC" and the words "cheaper" and "reliable" in the same sentence?

The only thing reliable about Oracle RAC is the money you spend on consultants trying to keep it running.

Of course, you being one of those consultants means you're quite biased.

Re:"More" means nothing.. what are the product pla

[Rockoon]

This is pretty much spot on.

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.

What about HP?

[sirwired]

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.

Sturggling with how they'll pay for it

[NSIM]

Heavy R&D spending, plus double the number of sales and support engineers is a lot of additional spending unless they can seriously eat into IBM and/or HP's UNIX business, I'll believe it when I see it.

Re:Everything for the database

[tyrr]

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:Still going to sell out to HP

[default luser]

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.