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Oracle HP Operating Systems

Dell and HP To Sell Oracle Operating Systems 91

Posted by Soulskill from the cross-contamination dept.
angry tapir writes "Oracle has announced that rival hardware vendors Dell and Hewlett-Packard intend to certify and resell its Solaris and Enterprise Linux operating systems as well as Oracle VM on their x86 servers. The announcement 'demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness,' company co-president Charles Phillips said in a statement."
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Dell and HP To Sell Oracle Operating Systems More

Dell and HP To Sell Oracle Operating Systems

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  • Good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slaxative ( 1867220 ) on Friday July 30, 2010 @02:03PM (#33086284)
    I don't see why they would not want to make their OS more readily available by allowing other hardware vendors to sell their OS. This makes good business sense.

    • Because if Joe Smoe Computer starts selling Oracle Linux and their hardware and support is crap it reflects poorly on Oracle. With Sun out of the picture, there are only three Enterprise hardware venders left: IBM, HP, and DELL. And Oracle sees IBM as a direct competitor. So that leaves HP and Dell.

  • "Demonstrates..." (Score:5, Insightful)

    by John Whitley ( 6067 ) on Friday July 30, 2010 @02:05PM (#33086318) Homepage

    demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness...

    [Pause for evil laughter omitted]

    ...and will provide Dell and HP customers with new levels of support...

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by TheDarkPassenger ( 1840942 )
      Oracle makes Apple look open.

      • Oracle makes Apple look open.

        They also, amazingly, make Apple look bad at sales/marketing. I've worked on dozens of projects that used Oracle as their database, and of them, I would say one actually needed something that expensive/heavyweight. The rest could have done just as well with something cheaper or most likely free-as-in-beer. Instead they were paying Oracle a boatload of money for software and spending another boatload of money on Oracle DBAs who largely performed tasks that were handled by deve

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by CastrTroy ( 595695 )
          I really can't see much of a use for something like Oracle. Either you are writing a small/medium sized application where something like MySQL/PostGres would do just fine out of the box, without any modifications, or you are doing something really large, which you end up writing your own custom storage solution for, which does exactly only what you need it to do, and is very finely tuned. Even large and busy sites like CraigsList use MySQL and other free products to handle their data.

          • Re:"Demonstrates..." (Score:5, Interesting)

            by afabbro ( 33948 ) on Friday July 30, 2010 @02:57PM (#33087006) Homepage

            I really can't see much of a use for something like Oracle. Either you are writing a small/medium sized application where something like MySQL/PostGres would do just fine out of the box, without any modifications, or you are doing something really large, which you end up writing your own custom storage solution for, which does exactly only what you need it to do, and is very finely tuned.

            Perhaps, but most shops find it's cheaper to license Oracle, DB/2, etc. than to write their own storage system from scratch, particularly if they need high multiuser concurrency and MVCC.

            Even large and busy sites like CraigsList use MySQL and other free products to handle their data.

            Craigslist does not have to manage a very large single image database. The data that appears for San Francisco does not have to be in sync with the ads that appears for Chicago. I imagine all of the ads for San Francisco (probably their biggest city) could fit in memory for a MySQL database. It's just easily compressable text and ads are short. Also, they don't keep more than 7 days. Given those requirements, MySQL is easy.

            Facebook does not really use MySQL but rather MySQL they've rewritten to use as a backing store for their gazillion memcache servers.

            At the other end of the spectrum, Amazon and telcos use Oracle, primarily because they need one consistent data image everywhere. Banks, airlines, shipping companies, etc. use DB/2 on the mainframe or Oracle for the same reason. If Facebook misses a post or doesn't update your home page, who cares...if a bank allows a payment because it's not looking at an up-to-date view of an account or Amazon 500 copies of a book when it only has 450 in stock, that is a problem.

            Oracle also has better features for minimizing or eliminating downtime for maintenance, recovering from user errors, disaster recovery, etc. And frankly, Oracle performs better under high workloads and scales further owing to better design. For now.

            Oracle is overused perhaps but it (and DB/2) still do things the free versions don't. The free versions are catching up...Postgres is at about Oracle 7 or 8, depending on which feature you look at. I do think they'll eventually catch up, but it's silly to say there is no use for something like Oracle.

            BTW, what drives overuse of Oracle is not laziness or tradition but scaling down of big solutions. Company X develops solution Y for $GIANT_CUSTOMER. They then sell it to smaller customers but have only tested it on Oracle, so smaller customers use Oracle. Vertical integration dictates software (and to some extent hardware) architecture in many cases.

            • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

              by Unordained ( 262962 )

              If you need good MVCC (busy OLTP environment shared with reporting, long-running transactions, multi-table reports, etc.), I'd recommend Firebird (or Interbase) or PostgreSQL. Interbase essentially pioneered MVCC. My experience with both Oracle and MS-SQL has been that they didn't really grok MVCC very well, and their hacks to back-port it aren't nearly as good as a DBMS built with it in mind. Oracle requires that you preconfigure INITRANS "just right" and it's not pretty if you don't. MS-SQL doesn't really

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by afabbro ( 33948 )

                My experience with both Oracle and MS-SQL has been that they didn't really grok MVCC very well, and their hacks to back-port it aren't nearly as good as a DBMS built with it in mind.

                Oracle has done MVCC since 1983 (Oracle 3). The original academic work on MVCC was 1981ish. Saying that the current version of Oracle (11) has back-ported hacks to support MVCC is ridiculous.

                • Would you prefer kludge? Oracle certainly didn't lose its locking (writers-block-readers) nature when they added it -- which I didn't say was recently. Their implementation is still limited compared to other good MVCC implementations, and they really don't seem to care, nor encourage anyone to use it. Seems they treat it as something only a niche market needs -- which may very well be the case, considering the number of large-scale apps that weren't built to use it, and were never upgraded to either, and ar

            • Facebook does not really use MySQL but rather MySQL they've rewritten to use as a backing store for their gazillion memcache servers.

              Erm... wait... what?

              Wouldn't that be, the software they've written in front of MySQL that knows how to use memcached? I don't see why you'd have to touch the MySQL code itself.

              At the other end of the spectrum, Amazon and telcos use Oracle,

              Interesting, because Amazon also does Dynamo [allthingsdistributed.com], which is very decidedly not Oracle.

          • Craigslist is neither large nor busy. Try a stock brokerage for example or Wal-Mart inventory management systems that runs off POS data if you want large and fast. Oracle is an Enterprise class database and it's massive overkill and a waste of money to use it for small environments. Plus it doesn't HAVE to be a web site to need Oracle. Products like SAP and other systems that do a lot of data manipulation and/or calculations but are not used to drive a website also use Oracle. You can buy one copy of Oracl

          • Re:"Demonstrates..." (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Hylandr ( 813770 ) on Friday July 30, 2010 @03:07PM (#33087154)
            Oracle is a very real threat to the open source community or Commercial Linux vendors in general. They have been rebuilding the Unix cathedral with an old guard dominance of Unix knowledge and development. Try finding any information for free on their websites. Now couple that with vendor lock in...

            - Dan.

          • I can see a few places where it might make sense, because if you have the kind of load to need Oracle, it may be cheaper to pay for Oracle and a DBA to develop something completely custom.

            But you don't necessarily need to -- there are all kinds of storage engines out there already, free and otherwise.

        • I've got to second that. It's not just that most of the projects which use it don't need it, it's that it's a kludge on top of a kludge on top of a kludge that makes IBM's zOS look good.

          It's not just that DBAs perform tasks which would otherwise be done by developers or sysadmins. It's that Oracle seems to almost actively encourage the DBA as a profession. A trivial example is the autoincrement column -- even sqlite has one built in, but no, on Oracle, you have to create a sequence first, then that primary

          • I don't think they're good at marketing in the traditional sense. At this point, I really, honestly, truly suspect blackjack and hookers are responsible for these kinds of business decisions, because I can't see a rational agent wasting that much time and money doing it so horribly wrong.

            I don't know that I'd go that far, although, Oracle, if this is true? I can be bought.

            Somehow business decision makers have gotten this idea that Oracle is the best database and that serious businesses all use it. That, i

            • Actually, at the moment, I'm developing this application (for an internship!) without the aid of a DBA or any such thing, which means I'm doing my own autoincrement primary keys.

              It also means I have the (possibly unique) perspective of trying to develop the full stack, and seeing just how much useless duplication and make-work there is.

              I guess I didn't realize it was quite as bad as you suggest -- that the DBAs were doing autoincrement primary keys. What I suspected, rather, was that the sheer amount of dic

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by jonadab ( 583620 )
        Are you kidding? Oracle makes _DEC_ look open. Apple's not even playing the same sport.

        However, I'm not sure it necessarily follows that they'll close up Solaris. As far as Oracle is concerned, the OS is basically a complementary component. Nobody is going to pay, for any operating system, anything resembling the kind of money Oracle likes to charge. But you do need the OS in order to run the Oracle software stack, so it's complementary to (i.e., goes with) their main product line. Arguably, it is in

  • Hey, Dell (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Dracos ( 107777 )

    If you really want to demonstrate your commitment to openness, let us buy laptops with Ubuntu.

    • Re:Hey, Dell (Score:5, Insightful)

      by commodore64_love ( 1445365 ) on Friday July 30, 2010 @02:14PM (#33086424) Journal

      Why?

      The Ubuntu laptop would end-up being more expensive (no subsidies from desktop adware or MSN). You're better off buying a cheaper, subsidized laptop with Windoze, and then wiping it with Ubuntu Linux.

      • Linux on a laptop is typically less of a "sure thing" than Linux on the desktop has become. Laptops have oddball setups and such that sometimes just don't work well with Linux. Given the much more limited ability to replace an individual component that isn't supported, it's also much more necessary to get all your components working out of the box.

        Even for laptops that do seemingly work fine, you'll have other odd issues (such as significantly reduced battery life - this issue is actually the reason why d

        • Consider running powertop and making the changes it suggests. Typically this irons out unexpected power drains with little user pain (answering Y/N.)

      • Except that companies routinely choose incompatible hardware; case in point, my Dell laptop shipped with a broadcom network card (this was not in any way indicated when I purchased the system) and I had to use ndiswrapper for literally two years before there was a compatible driver. If they were to expand their line of Ubuntu laptops, that would mean better compatibility -- at least we would have some assurance that they won't put random junk into our systems.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by orient ( 535927 )
          With Mandriva, all the hardware on my Linux unfriendly HP tablet (Broadcomm wireless included) worked from the very beginning - that is during the setup process. This made me switch the tablet to Mandriva.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DMoylan ( 65079 )

        i would rather pay an extra 100 than have ms count one more licence for their shitty os sold. it costs them nothing to make that windows licence. you're not getting a physical product like a cd or manual.

        if they were selling their product below cost like their xbox consoles and buying the product and nothing else cost them money then yes i would buy it.

        yes i hate ms that much. hey it's slashdot! :-)

        ymmv

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by JordanH ( 75307 )

        Do you have inside information concerning the subsidies, because that's privileged information. I'd be surprised if the adware and MSN pays for the OEM Windows license, but maybe I could be surprised.

        I do recall that netbooks used to be cheaper without windows. I think MS has since struck arrangements that make this no longer possible, but that's the way it used to be.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nurb432 ( 527695 )

        That is short term thinking, and only perpetuates the problem.

        The long term solution is to bite the bullet, pay a little more and run the others out of business.

    • Re:Hey, Dell & HP! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30, 2010 @02:18PM (#33086486)

      It't not just Dell. I bought an HP dv8t Quad edition (core i7) for $2018.99 a few months back. After loading Linux on it, found out the ONLY way to update the BIOS is via Windows7. The ACPI in the BIOS that shipped with the laptop is severely broken, but because they have tied the BIOS update to the Windows 7 OS I have no way to update the system. I for one will NEVER buy another HP product again!

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by orient ( 535927 )
        The 3 HP laptops I bought broke a total of 5 times during warranty - in the first year.

      • Re:Hey, Dell & HP! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by T5 ( 308759 ) on Friday July 30, 2010 @10:05PM (#33092260)

        Same deal with a Samsung netbook that I purchased because of its semi-ruggedness (NB30). Out of the box BIOS was junk (ACPI problems, as usual, manifested as dropping keystrokes due to odd, periodic, momentary machine stalls), and the BIOS updater runs only under Windows. You can't even run the BIOS package (.exe) on another machine and manually extract the BIOS - updater recognizes that it's on a different machine and refuses to run.

        Contacting Samsung was an exercise in futility. Tech support kept insisting I run the .exe and also told me that I needed to make sure that I installed the battery level monitor .exe beforehand. The tech support person could not grasp that I was running Linux, not Windows, despite my best efforts to persuade them otherwise. Unbelievable.

        My mistake was not making this a dual boot machine, just to keep Windows around for such work. It's become standard operating procedure for me now to dual boot any machine that's likely to need a BIOS update (Dell, to their credit, is not one of these vendors). And with the tendency of vendors not to include CD/DVD restore media, I'll have to use some other install media to reinstall Windows just to perform what should be a simple BIOS update.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hAckz0r ( 989977 )
      First, its not Dell or HP that is being "Open", its Oracle. Oracle is Open to the idea that you buy their specific brand of software, which btw is not Ubuntu in any case.

      Dell and HP still have to answer to MS because of market volume and legacy contracts, but with Oracle (possibly trying to be the new 800 lb gorilla in the OS market place) that might just change. That will still be tough, because Solaris is still a knitch market, and Linux is too competitive, with too much variety to choose from.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Idbar ( 1034346 )
      I wonder how will they compare Solaris to Windows (and/or Ubuntu) [slashdot.org]

  • Friend/ employee hates Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)

    by commodore64_love ( 1445365 ) on Friday July 30, 2010 @02:12PM (#33086404) Journal

    I have a friend who works for Oracle. He's constantly bitching about them and their disorganization. He's trying to find someplace else to work, even if it's the Evil Microsoft. Wow. Must be really bad, if he's willing to do that!

    • This is typical of most large companies. I heard the same thing from a friend who worked at Sun ~5 years ago. It's the same way with HP, according to some of my colleagues. IBM too.

      • I think for him the shock is that Sun was not *as* disorganized as the new Oracle (which bought him out).

        Quote: "In the Sun Solaris group, meetings moved right along and no time was wasted. In the Sun Cloud group, it depended on who ran the meeting. Under the new Oracle management, every f'ing meeting is a waste of time."

    • Re:Friend/ employee hates Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hoggoth ( 414195 ) on Friday July 30, 2010 @02:47PM (#33086840) Journal

      Oracle swallowed up a company that acquired a company that bought a company that had a technology I needed to use. I called Oracle and tried to find someone, anyone, who knew anything about how I could purchase it. Nobody had ever heard of either the product or the company. Finally after hours of searching I found the entire thing available fully functional for download deep inside Oracle's labyrinth of twisty little web pages, all alike. The text had disclaimers that you had to purchase a license to use the software. I called back and tried to find someone, anyone, who would let me pay for the software. No luck. I'm testing it now, but I don't know if I can use it in production. Neither does anyone else.

    • Most people I hear from really enjoy working for Microsoft. It's their customers who are angry with them :)

  • Sun allowing Oracle to buy them was the biggest mistake ever.

    Oracle is taking a once great company and flushing them completely down the toilet.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      To be fair, Sun was doing a fine job of flushing themselves down the toilet without Oracle's help. Oracle has just reached for the plunger...

    • No. No no no.

      Oracle is taking the utterly destroyed guts of a once great company and trying to decide what the hell to do with it.

      Sun was dying. Jonathan Schwartz, may Satan piss on his corpse when he dies, spent his entire tenure trying to gut the company of technological value and sell it off at a profit. I guess he should be happy that he succeeded, but I hope he lies awake at night (on his bed of money!), haunted by the fact that he killed the last pure Unix company in existence. His greed heralded the

  • This is another example of great management by Oracle. They want to sell a server product so they team with HP and Dell this is a great move. This idea did wonders for Red Hat and Suse I hope it does the same for Oracle. Plus since HP and Dell already ship Linux I am sure they will be happy to ship Unix.

  • Ubuntu Linux? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Mizery De Aria ( 554294 )
    Demonstrates their openness? Didn't Dell recently stop offering Ubuntu Linux? Perhaps this is related to why Dell stopped offering Ubuntu Linux? X_X

    • Re:Ubuntu Linux? (Score:5, Informative)

      by CannonballHead ( 842625 ) on Friday July 30, 2010 @02:34PM (#33086684)
      That is not true. [computerworld.com] Granted, they don't have many [dell.com] but they do offer ... three... but that includes a desktop system with Ubuntu 10.04. Which was released pretty recently. Which means they are still actively doing stuff with Ubuntu over there at Dell.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jerry ( 6400 )

        A couple days ago I did a count of the number and kind of computers offered by DELL that come with Ubuntu pre-installed. Dell offered, when I counted, a total of 32 different laptops and, surprisingly, 32 different desktops. Only 3% of their desktop offerings and 6% of their laptop offerings ran Ubuntu pre-installed. I also noted that the customization offerings were much less with the Ubuntu. With friends like Dell, Linux needs no enemies. That's why I say that Dell offers Linux so that Microsoft ca

        • Our anecdotal evidence differs in the latter part of your post. I've had problems with having people use Linux. Certain functionality just doesn't work smoothly, at least with the distros I tried some people out on; specifically: sound, video (both DVDs and flash-based), and printing. The printing issue is primarily just a driver issue, granted, but that's hard to explain that the need to buy a new printer ;) I did get it working after a while. The DVDs and flash-based thing? That took some time to fi

  • Maybe I'm getting old, but I just can't get used to hearing things like Oracle Java and Oracle's Solaris.

    Can they please just keep the old Sun name for me and just keep the revenue.

    • Maybe I'm getting old

      I'm 18, so I'm still considered to be relatively young by most, and even I cringe when I hear/see Sun replaced with Oracle.

    • Re:never get used to this (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Third Position ( 1725934 ) on Friday July 30, 2010 @02:38PM (#33086728)

      Don't worry - I suspect you will not have to hear things like that for long. Give it five years, and those products will likely have died a slow, lingering death under the stewardship of Oracle.

    • I hear that. Last week I was setting up a machine at home for Java development (I'm doing .NET work professionally right now, but I've also done years of Java dev and might well go back to it for a future project, so I like to try to keep my hand in) and seeing the Oracle logo on Java installers broke my heart.

      I used Sparcs in school and I've had a soft spot for Sun since, even when they did stupid things. Oracle I've never liked and years of working with the Oracle database and/or Peoplesoft have not imp

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by larien ( 5608 )
      I upgraded the firmware on one of our servers in June and was slightly shocked when the OBP banner said "Copyright Oracle Corporation" where it used to say "Sun Microsystem"... the rebranding continues apace...

  • I guess this is further confirmation that Oracle doesn't care to do much hardware stuff outside high end SPARC stuff.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by captrb ( 1298149 )
      I don't think that is true. I think they realize that they will be leaving opportunities on the table if they require their customers to run Oracle hardware. There are too many "HP shops" and "Dell shops" that don't stray from their vendor. Oracle still wants to sell their OS+Database combo's even if they don't get the hardware for the triple-word-score. One of Sun's greatest mistakes was not understanding the importance of customers with heterogeneous environments. And yet oddly, being "open" (before
  • Just what the tech world needed - return of the SparcStation!

  • Sun was already doing this with HP, Dell, IBM...

  • Sorry Oracle. I have to do this without you. http://www.opensparc.net/ [opensparc.net] Now, to make something awsome

  • throw more of their money at Larry Ellison so he can buy more fighter jets and luxury yachts.

    It will also assure their continued lock-in to one of the most expensive pieces of proprietary software sold. That "Premium" support they mention... will it be as good as their current support? My son, the Oracle dba, hsa abandon Oracle's paid support in favor of the open Oracle forums, where support is faster coming and better. That doesn't stop his bosses from continuing to throw money at Oracle for each CPU (n

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