Oracle: Proud, Self-Reliant, Increasingly Isolated 119
jfruhlinger writes "One of Oracle's stated purposes when it bought Sun more than two years ago was to create full-stack appliances: SPARC servers running Solaris or Oracle Linux and Oracle's suite of app servers and of course its omnipresent database. Its new T4 processor is a reaffirmation of that strategy. But has the company painted itself into a corner? While it's cautiously embraced the cloud, its cloud services don't work with Windows or other companies' offerings, which kills much of their potential value; meanwhile, they've managed to alienate open source developers and big swaths of the Java community. It seems that Oracle's inability to play well with others is locking them out of the multipolar future."
Re:Oracle and multipolar (Score:4, Insightful)
Oracle Linux is silly. I think Oracle will likely start licensing RedHat as it gets more difficult to support. Once they start writing checks their problems with RedHat will be over.
I don't agree with the author.
Their stack is: bare metal, Oracle Linux, Oracle ASM (fs/volume mgr), Oracle Cluster, then DB, app, etc.
In other words, from bare metal (which they also sell :-) to app (and they sell some giant ones - Peoplesoft, Siebel, Oracle eBusiness, etc.) they can sell you the entire stack. Everything below the DB is reasonably priced (compared to Veritas, RedHat, etc.) and exists mainly as a way to sell you the DB and up, where the real money is (because OS, cluster, etc. are commodities at this point)
I'd be really surprised if they'd yank one one layer of the stack (OEL).
They may merge in some Sun tech, though - right now that is a whole different stack.
Re:The future doesn't look that multipolar (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, because websites will all be hosted in the magical cloud, which somehow transcends the need for servers, and nobody will ever, EVER want to host ANYTHING on their own servers. Idiot.
There isn't a -1 stupid moderation, so I substitute overrated.
When I was a young engineer in the early 90's most of my time was spent migrating services from mainframes to standalone servers. It was the epitome of progress - instead of these shared resources, you could have your very own dedicated resources, complete with redundant power, storage, memory, etc
At the time, one of the old engineers told me "we'll be changing all this back in 15 or 20 years, wait and see"
These days, I can appreciate the old man's wisdom. There are two trends which have been constant for as long as I've been working in IT:
Give it another 20 years, and I'll probably be seeing out the twighlight of my career dragging services back out of the "cloud" on to discrete hardware. Having your own dedicated resources will be the epitome of progress, compared to all that old-fashioned "cloud" computing.