The acquisition of Sparc and Solaris further estranges Oracle from Microsoft... Most of Oracle's revenues come from windows-based products and the Solaris portfolio isn't likely to change that. Likewise, they now become a competitor in Java vs. Dot-net. It isn't smart to step up from mere competitor to antagonist without gaining a massive new strength, and that didn't happen here.
Then there's Java. Drains quite a bit of cash without making enough money and Oracle as a comp
My leaky memory says that 40% of Oracle's income (profit?) comes from Oracle on SPARC, and another 20% from
Oracle on other Unix.
If IBM had bought Sun and phased out SPARC like they did Sequent, then they'd probably own 50% of Oracle's market.
It's far better for Oracle to buy their own hardware supplier than depend on others: the Sequent was highly optimized for Oracle performance, and then disappeared in a little puff of greasy smoke when IBM bought it and
shut it down in favor of Power.
That's got to
My leaky memory says that 40% of Oracle's income (profit?) comes from Oracle on SPARC, and another 20% from Oracle on other Unix.
I did the migration of the last Oracle Sparc to Oracle Linux system at my previous employer a couple years ago. Before this migration, it had moved to Fujitsu from Sun several years previous. (Oracle on Linux just wasn't there yet, a high-performance 8-CPU Intel machine monopolizing a whole SAN for performance reasons was full of race conditions because driver developers never had seen a machine or storage that powerful).
Sun just couldn't compete. For Sparc stuff, we would have needed a $5 million machine t
Odd, one of my customers reports the very opposite: they were constantly replacing Intel components during the eight months I was there at the very least weekly, and had one Sun board die. They said the disk failure rates were lower on the Sun too, but I don't know by how much.
Indeed, or selection biases (;-)) I know both the Sun and Dell systems were using the disk vendors' "enterprise" lines, but I don't know about the rest of the Intels.
It's possible to have whole bad lots, even from the enterprise lines. I'm hearing this doesn't happen so often now, but when you're the person experiencing the bad lot, this can give one hell of a bad impression. Supposing this case, the phenomenon would be sampling bias.
I still avoid WD like the plague, even though I am aware they have long since fixed the quality problems that led to the bad lots in the 90's... can't help myself. Lost like 3 drives on a personal system in a row...
Bad deal for both companies (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a bad deal for both companies.
The acquisition of Sparc and Solaris further estranges Oracle from Microsoft... Most of Oracle's revenues come from windows-based products and the Solaris portfolio isn't likely to change that. Likewise, they now become a competitor in Java vs. Dot-net. It isn't smart to step up from mere competitor to antagonist without gaining a massive new strength, and that didn't happen here.
Then there's Java. Drains quite a bit of cash without making enough money and Oracle as a comp
Re: (Score:5, Interesting)
My leaky memory says that 40% of Oracle's income (profit?) comes from Oracle on SPARC, and another 20% from Oracle on other Unix.
If IBM had bought Sun and phased out SPARC like they did Sequent, then they'd probably own 50% of Oracle's market.
It's far better for Oracle to buy their own hardware supplier than depend on others: the Sequent was highly optimized for Oracle performance, and then disappeared in a little puff of greasy smoke when IBM bought it and shut it down in favor of Power. That's got to
Re: (Score:4, Informative)
My leaky memory says that 40% of Oracle's income (profit?) comes from Oracle on SPARC, and another 20% from
Oracle on other Unix.
I did the migration of the last Oracle Sparc to Oracle Linux system at my previous employer a couple years ago. Before this migration, it had moved to Fujitsu from Sun several years previous. (Oracle on Linux just wasn't there yet, a high-performance 8-CPU Intel machine monopolizing a whole SAN for performance reasons was full of race conditions because driver developers never had seen a machine or storage that powerful).
Sun just couldn't compete. For Sparc stuff, we would have needed a $5 million machine t
Re: (Score:2)
--dave
Re: (Score:2)
They said the disk failure rates were lower on the Sun too, but I don't know by how much.
You should be aware that neither Intel nor Sun make disk drives. The most likely explanation for this is manufacturer lot variance, or just luck.
C//
Re:Bad deal for both companies (Score:2)
--dave
Re: (Score:2)
It's possible to have whole bad lots, even from the enterprise lines. I'm hearing this doesn't happen so often now, but when you're the person experiencing the bad lot, this can give one hell of a bad impression. Supposing this case, the phenomenon would be sampling bias.
I still avoid WD like the plague, even though I am aware they have long since fixed the quality problems that led to the bad lots in the 90's... can't help myself. Lost like 3 drives on a personal system in a row...
C//
Re: (Score:2)
Ouch! That really hurts!
--dave