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.
Sun classically built machines in which the airflow is better than the then-standard, substandard cases you get everywhere else.
Keeping drives alive is easy: just move lots of air past the top and bottom. But case designers don't... They pack them right on top of each other, attach sheet metal directly bottom screw holes and locate them somewhere in the case where the air doesn't move.
Dell circa 3 years ago was one of the worst offenders while HP's DL series products circa 3 years ago was best of breed. Now things have almost done a 180 where Dell's rackmounts have respectable spacing around the drives and well architected air flow while HP's SAS arrays are crap.
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:Bad deal for both companies (Score:2)
Sun classically built machines in which the airflow is better than the then-standard, substandard cases you get everywhere else.
Keeping drives alive is easy: just move lots of air past the top and bottom. But case designers don't... They pack them right on top of each other, attach sheet metal directly bottom screw holes and locate them somewhere in the case where the air doesn't move.
Dell circa 3 years ago was one of the worst offenders while HP's DL series products circa 3 years ago was best of breed. Now things have almost done a 180 where Dell's rackmounts have respectable spacing around the drives and well architected air flow while HP's SAS arrays are crap.