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.
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//
The most likely explanation is the difference in how controllers handle a marginal drive. For example, 10 years ago it was rare to have a RAID solution that re-wrote a bad block rather than just failing out the whole drive.
I have pulled a lot of 'failed' drives out of RAID arrays to check the SMART data, and even in modern arrays, a good portion of those drives are mostly OK.
Sometimes it's a controller that is too quick to kick out a drive, other times it is a controller that decides a drive is no good if it occasionally freezes for a couple seconds. So I won't use the drive failure rate to determine which RAID array is better.
Also, vibration is quite significant (remember, all drives seek together in many setups), as is cooling.
The most likely explanation is the difference in how controllers handle a marginal drive. For example, 10 years ago it was rare to have a RAID solution that re-wrote a bad block rather than just failing out the whole drive.
This is an interesting insight. I know there is a sea of differences in how enterprise SAN controllers do this. The very best ones will actually REBOOT hard drives, on the ground that most hard disk errors are actually firmware bugs. This was determined by the vendor, DDN, through extensi
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)
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//
The most likely explanation is the difference in how controllers handle a marginal drive. For example, 10 years ago it was rare to have a RAID solution that re-wrote a bad block rather than just failing out the whole drive.
I have pulled a lot of 'failed' drives out of RAID arrays to check the SMART data, and even in modern arrays, a good portion of those drives are mostly OK.
Sometimes it's a controller that is too quick to kick out a drive, other times it is a controller that decides a drive is no good if it occasionally freezes for a couple seconds. So I won't use the drive failure rate to determine which RAID array is better.
Also, vibration is quite significant (remember, all drives seek together in many setups), as is cooling.
Re: (Score:2)
The most likely explanation is the difference in how controllers handle a marginal drive. For example, 10 years ago it was rare to have a RAID solution that re-wrote a bad block rather than just failing out the whole drive.
This is an interesting insight. I know there is a sea of differences in how enterprise SAN controllers do this. The very best ones will actually REBOOT hard drives, on the ground that most hard disk errors are actually firmware bugs. This was determined by the vendor, DDN, through extensi