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Larry Ellison Says 'Amazon's Lead is Over' As Oracle Unveils New Cloud Infrastructure (venturebeat.com) 157

Oracle has unveiled its second generation of cloud infrastructure for third-party developers to run their applications in Oracle data centers. What is interesting about the announcement is that Oracle co-founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison claiming that "Amazon's lead is over. Amazon's going to have serious competition going forward." From a VentureBeat report: One particular instance, or virtual-machine (VM) type, that Oracle is making available in this second-generation offering -- the Dense IO Shape -- offers 28.8TB, 512GB, and 36 cores, at a price of $5.40 per hour. This product offers more than 10 times the input-output capacity of Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically the i2.8xlarge instance, said Ellison. Currently, AWS leads the cloud infrastructure market, with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM trailing behind. Oracle's public cloud was not included in the most recent version of Gartner's highly regarded cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant, which was released last month. "Oracle also does not have enough market share to qualify for inclusion," the authors of the report wrote.
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Larry Ellison Says 'Amazon's Lead is Over' As Oracle Unveils New Cloud Infrastructure

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  • Oracle, ever the embrace, and HIKE THE SUPPORT PRICE, MOAR! MOAR! GOUGE THAT CUSTOMER WALLET!

    Never mind. Hopefully they'll go away like the other dinosaurs did.

    • by Esteanil ( 710082 ) on Monday September 19, 2016 @04:28PM (#52919249) Homepage Journal

      * license fees not included. All computers connecting to the cloud must be separately licensed. Unlicensed connectees will be charged to site owner at a 600% penalty. Any use of competing cloud services incur license fees for all computers operating in or connecting to the entirety of said cloud service, charged to site owner.
      Site owner agrees Oracle holds title to first- through fifth-born.

      • Oracle also will own copyright to any content stored on their servers. Those placing their copyrighted materials on the server will face copyright infringement consequences.
      • by jeff4747 ( 256583 ) on Monday September 19, 2016 @09:40PM (#52921093)

        Wow. They're really loosening their licensing terms.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        License fees don't make as much sense when you're essentially renting the software, as happens in "cloud" services. Take the Bloomberg terminal financial data service for example. You pay a monthly rental fee for each workstation installed at your site, another monthly fee for the privilege of connecting, which also includes a set number of pre-paid data inquiries. After that you pay for every query made. They have you coming and going. Oracle will definitely go with the Bloomberg model with their cloud ser

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Does anyone fall for Larrry's bombast anymore? Sorry Larry, but 10X greater I/O on a super-high end server that practically no one will need/us is too little, too late to catch up with AWS' lead which is by now, unsurpassable by you. The only company that might have a chance of competing head on is Microsoft, and even then they would need to dramatically cut their prices in a number of areas. I think I calculated that it cost 20X more to host my videos online with Microsoft at $1.95/GB than Amazon Cloudfro

    • by ndykman ( 659315 )

      On what service?. Azure has CDN services with similar pricing structure as AWS. No free tier, though.

      Of course, cloud pricing is very tricky, overall, but the cost structures between Amazon and Azure are more and more in line these days, The competition between the two is starting to show some pricing benefits.

      • by AK Marc ( 707885 )
        Azure is insanely expensive for VMs. Azure is MS's cloud play to extend Windows developers into the cloud. A hosted API is cheap. A hosted VM is insane (and not portable). With most hosted VMs you can use an OVA or other container to move seamlessly between platforms. With Azure, you can't even move seamlessly between Hyper-V and Azure, and they are both MS VM platforms. You develop for a Windows box, but rather than running it as a .NET on a web server, you run it on Azure. If you want to run a wind
        • No, not quite.

          Whether OVA or VMDK, moving workloads back and forth among cloud vendors isn't quite simple, but it is do-able on Azure, or if you think about it, other cloud vendors. The control plane to do this is immature, but it might not make much difference if the herd moves from VMs to container fleets.

          Full compute costs are cheaper on AWS, for now, but Windows on AWS vs Windows on Azure isn't "insanely more expensive", not even "moderately more expensive".

          Oracle, however, largely requires a customer t

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Apple could probably catch up with Amazon if they wanted to...or at least it could have back when Jobs was "inspiring" them. It wouldn't have been cheaper, but that's not the only way to win.

  • Aw hell no (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TFlan91 ( 2615727 ) on Monday September 19, 2016 @04:17PM (#52919153)

    I can 100% see some fine print in their ToS that binds that person from ever using any other cloud vendor ever again.

    All this bad news recently circling Oracle doesn't lead credence to their reliability as a cloud vendor.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      They don't need fine print in the ToS, Oracle doesn't play nice with anything unrelated to Oracle nor is it remotely straightforward to migrate to another DB. The lock-in effect is even worse than it is for Microsoft products.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Looks like you have never used Oracle. Oracle DB once supported 91 operating system and even today, it supports more operating system than next 3 database vendors COMBINED. Oracle has adapter for virtually all apps including SalesForce, SAP etc. It is the largest DB vendor even on Windows. It sells more x86 hardware despite owning silicon to software with its Sparc. It is the only enterprise software company with pretty much full price list of its standard software offering (try to get price of IBM Webspher

        • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )
          It's true that Oracle could have an awesomely compelling offering from silicon to software. Unfortunately, while their hardware is definitely better on the high end (Sun made some awesome high end products) their software products at this point have enough stipulations associated with them to give anyone pause. It's an all in option, much like any ERP purchase.
        • Even if it is better is it really that much better to justify the cost.
          We have 2 major open source Databases MariaDB and PostGreSQL and we have inexpensive Microsoft SQL which all do more than what most people need anyways.
          Back in the old days if someone needed a Database they went with Oracle because they had too however computing has advanced and Oracle is the dinosaur in the market a relic of the mainframe days praying on the stupid CIO who's head is still stuck in the 1980s

    • Re:Aw hell no (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tnk1 ( 899206 ) on Monday September 19, 2016 @04:30PM (#52919259)

      At this point, just the name Oracle is enough to make me stay well away from their cloud. I have seen what they have done with their database and how they manage to wring what money they can out of the unsuspecting and have no interest in feeding that beast, even if their prices are rock bottom.

      AWS has its problems, but their pricing and product offering is not bad enough that I would go into the gutter to let that disease into my organization. I'd go Azure long before I'd go Oracle in any event. (Not that such a thought is something I consider appetizing either...)

  • Amazon may just as well shutdown today.. Larry says it's done.
    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by Jawnn ( 445279 )

      Amazon may just as well shutdown today.. Larry says it's done.

      Looks like Larry's been reading the Trump presidential campaign playbook.

  • by dmomo ( 256005 ) on Monday September 19, 2016 @04:23PM (#52919189)

    Amazon's lead is over when they've lost the market share, not when someone who wishes it were over announces it as such.

    • But Oracle is going to be huuuuge. And they'll totally bury crooked Amazon. And they'll build a firewall and they'll have Amazon pay for it.
  • What could go wrong?

      (too lazy to link every single letter in that sentence a different oracle security and or biz fail, so use google)

  • Wishful thinking (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cyberthanasis12 ( 926691 ) on Monday September 19, 2016 @04:26PM (#52919219)
    I don't trust/like the "cloud". I don't like AWS in particular. But if there was the slightest possibility that I had to use Oracle cloud, I would rather marry Amazon to escape.
    • Devil advocate: VirtualBox. That's one thing Oracle does well, and for free.
      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        What's the use case where VirtualBox is the best choice? I know it's one of the top three virtualizers, but I, personally, have never had the need for anything beyond qemu.

        • * Runs on Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris
          * Can run headless and detached from GUI
          * can teleport VMs between hosts, even if they run different OSs
          * free and easy to install/use.

          I don't find that VMware workstation is any better in general. VMware can run virtualize ESXi easily and work as in interface to a full ESXi though.
          KVM with Virt-Manager is comparable to VirtualBox IMO. It can be extended with oVirt and OpenStack. It's Linux only which hurts it for desktop, but not servers.

          In general, if
      • by guruevi ( 827432 )

        Most of Sun's tech they purchased is still free but has been very much neglected by Oracle. There are some minor improvements to VBox over time but in comparison to KVM/QEMU, it's very minor.

      • And like everything else they do marginally well... it's because they bought it. Every good Oracle product was developed by a company that wasn't Oracle.

        VirtualBox represents one of the few cases where they bought something, kept it alive and managed NOT to royally fuck it up 3 months later. There are plenty of cases where they failed at that though. Many even from the same purchase that got them virtualbox. SunOS/Solaris is basically dead now. MySQL they screwed up so badly that the world is being taken ov

    • "Use but don't trust." is my general motto for cloud stuff. What you gain from cloud services is only truly yours when removal of those cloud services cannot take it away from you. "May be cancelled for business reasons at short notice" and similar are caveats to essentially all cloud services (given that those 'business reasons' may involve insolvency, which overrides any contracted obligations to you).

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by gavron ( 1300111 ) on Monday September 19, 2016 @04:27PM (#52919235)

    Larry Ellison is a sociopath http://www.canadianbusiness.co... [canadianbusiness.com] who has singlehandedly done more damage to the software world https://www.wired.com/2014/05/... [wired.com] than any other man since software became a thing. His self-aggrandizing attention-seeking narcissism https://books.google.com/books... [google.com] proves that when you have money and you're a dick the media still loves you.

    Larry Ellison is a liar.

    If he says Amazon's lead is over you can rest assured knowing that three things are true:
    1. Amazon's lead is not over
    2. Larry is hoping to create a self-fulfilling prophecy so that it will be true
    3. He's going for the free PR that he's getting by saying outrageous thing. It's a Trump thing.

    E
    P.S. The subject line I wrote is "Ellison is a terrorist." Given all the explosives he's set off in Java, APIs, Harmony, etc. the man should be locked up.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      When Darth Vader said "pray i don't alter it further". He was actually quoting Oracle. There is no way I'd uump into anything Oracle is doing, even if the specs looked better on paper. You know it is somehow going to cost you more in the end.

    • He does kinda have a supervillain beard

      I mean I just expect him to be terrorizing the world from a giant mechanical spider to which our weapons are useless ...the only way to stop it is to install the latest Java security update -- something-something hubris etc

      • by Anne Thwacks ( 531696 ) on Monday September 19, 2016 @05:15PM (#52919611)
        I mean I just expect him to be terrorizing the world from a giant mechanical spider to which our weapons are useless

        expect? I would link to the videos but the NDA prevents it.

      • by chaboud ( 231590 )

        Fortunately for humanity, that giant mechanical spider is sitting in the basement of Oracle, half built and mired in scaling issues.

        The next time you decry human idiocy, remember that it was all that saved you from Larry Ellison...

    • by Jack9 ( 11421 ) on Monday September 19, 2016 @05:09PM (#52919535)

      > who has singlehandedly done more damage to the software world

      That title is reserved by Bill Gates. WTF has Larry done to software? Nothing. I mean they took the baby MS steps of creating a walled garden of substandard software and letting their once decent product line fester and slowly moulder. Positioning to do it again is not any worse. Oracle fails to even come close to setting poor standards, wiping out standards, wiping out companies, creatior locking down hardware that MS achieved. What a warped perspective to imagine Oracle has affected the software profession (much less industry).

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by baboon ( 4086 )

        Thank you. I post less than once a year, but I have to speak now. Modding up would not be good enough.

        I have stated almost this exact quote many, many times throughout my life, but always attributing the honor to "Bill Gates". It is truly tragic to consider where we could have been now, or even twenty years ago, if that ill-conceived cardboard substitute for an operating system hadn't been unleashed upon the world. Let us not forget.

        Windows is like a hollow plastic hammer. It appeals to the timid who a

        • by chaboud ( 231590 )

          You may not like Windows (note: none of my computer equipment, phones, or work machines run Windows), but it normalized a pretty significant set of operating system features ranging from preemptive multitasking to pluggable filesystems to a workable fast userspace mutex. Windows also maintained a *wildly* long history of binary compatibility well beyond virtually any other OS out there.

          They did some next level shit.

          I was an Amiga user, a Mac user, a Linux junkie, etc. To call Windows "playing with a toy"

          • by baboon ( 4086 )

            Ah, yes, I took the Amiga route, probably far longer than it merited, up until about the point where I got a military-supplied SGI workstation to use in my roach-infested college apartment.

            To be fair, I only used Windows for any serious purpose up through XP, for cross-platform fully-abstracted simulation software as well as large-scale PC/Console games. It's reassuring to hear that things have dramatically improved since then, although it is odd I'm just hearing about it now. I found a prospering industr

            • The original Windows was a graphic interface on top of MS-DOS, and a lot of the stuff was slow to change for compatibility reasons. MS-DOS was a takeoff on CP/M, so the ancestry goes back to the mid to late 70s.

              Emaciated CLI.

              You had MS-DOS commands, typically, which were good enough to run the machine.

              File paths contain backslash, which is also a string special character and just pointlessly different than the existing standard.

              There was a standard back then? CP/M used slash for command arguments, mu

      • by lusid1 ( 759898 )

        The difference is the anti-Oracle sentiment is universal. If this were about Microsoft some supporters would be jumping to their defense. The only people who ever defend Oracle are on their payroll.

        • And even then only *while* on their payroll. The day I resigned my job at Oracle I became one their most vocal attackers on /.

          Nothing makes you hate Larry like having worked for the fucker...

      • by sad_ ( 7868 )

        Ellison is to enterprise software what microsoft is to consumer software.

      • Would you say that any of this software has done well under Oracle? Is the user community satisfied?

    • Ellison and Oracle were heavily involved in Iron Man 2. I mean was Justin Hammer basically just Larry as a weapons dealer? All he had to do was tack on 'the press is about to run out of ink' line and his ascendance to James Bond villain would be complete.
    • None of these tech company leaders are "nice guys." Most of them exaggerate for effect and press. Most of them treat employees as "replaceable cogs." Many lie about what their company's have to ship and only fix it later (if ever) with an update.... of course such "misrepresentation" will get them the customers money now, rather than later or never.
  • by MAXOMENOS ( 9802 ) <mike&mikesmithfororegon,com> on Monday September 19, 2016 @04:28PM (#52919237) Homepage
    Oracle is going to beat Amazon? Not Google, not Microsoft? Oracle? That strikes me as VERY unlikely. They might have the tech, but they're not going to have the customer base.
    • I agree. They have a hell of an uphill climb... though they do have enterprise customers.

      But does Oracle have any customer loyalty? I don't think I have ever heard anyone recommend Oracle anything (not talking about Sun's ex-products).... only grudgingly accept it as the only viable option due to vendor lock in.

      • But does Oracle have any customer loyalty?

        Oh yes, lots. Mostly from C?O types though - people who fly a lot and see the Oracle and SAP adverts outside the First Class lounge, but don't have to deal with the technology on a day to day basis and don't mind paying high premiums for having someone to blame at the next board meeting if things go wrong.

    • Think about the fact that Intel currently runs entire batches of CPUs customized for Amazon EC2. Yeah, for some small scale cluster Oracle's got some blisteringly fast cluster with kick ass interconnects and fast storage. However unless they're ready to invest the billions Amazon has already invested in AWS/EC2, they'll never be able to compete with amazon at scale.

      Also, no matter what oracle does it's still trapped in Amazon's paradigm. Whatever they make for a cluster still has to adhere to amazon's st
    • by aralin ( 107264 )

      Oracle is the only company that can beat Amazon. They got a way to bring the customers there as all the enterprise stuff will run in Oracle Cloud and if it does not, they will buy the company or run it out of business. Eventually the startups will go where the customers are as the interconnectivity and closeness to data, latency to service, etc will start to be an issue. Oracle can pull this off technically and they even hired former Amazon people to do it.

      So in my expert opinion it might be the best time t

  • Who in their right mind would agree to more Oracle lock-in than they absolutely have to?

    Oracle is definitely one of those companies who would not hesitate to hold you over a barrel once you are all cozy in their infrastructure.

    Oh, look, you are running our DB software... on 1000 cores....

    • Who in their right mind would agree to more Oracle lock-in than they absolutely have to?

      I don't know if they were in their "right mind", but the state of Oregon just did [slashdot.org]

      • Uhm, I don't think you read that article correctly. Oregon walked away from $260M they paid Oracle and went to the Federal Exchange. Oregon has DBs & apps (probably mostly internal) that use Oracle already, and they're getting to use them for "free" as part of the settlement for a time. They were already locked-in for many other uses, but didn't stick with them for their health exchange.

        • Um, I don't think that you read the second paragraph of the article. Oregon got unlimited use of Oracle software for 6 years and some amount of support.

          What do you think those Oracle support people are going to be doing for the next 6 years? Do you think that they are going to be promoting alternative solutions? Or do you think they might be promoting more dependence on Oracle, which, remember, is free for the next 6 years?

  • Oracle has screwed over almost their entire customer base including myself due to licensing shenanigans. So no I will not be purchasing anything from that company ever again.
  • Want to really piss larry off? Lease some Oracle cloud instances and do nothing but run Android VMs and maybe some bigtable databases inside them. Say it's for app testing.
  • Based on the way his flagship Frankenstein product works, I only have one thing to say; Good fucking luck convincing your customers you can get this shit right.

    One can only imagine the terrorist licensing model they'll invoke regardless of performance.

  • by Wokan ( 14062 ) on Monday September 19, 2016 @04:47PM (#52919393) Journal

    Oracle DB - Licensing prices capable of bringing down even the richest empire
    Java - Dead language walking on the client side. Server side use waning, though still has a lot of life remaining from Sun's stewardship (even with Sun's missteps).
    OpenOffice.org - About to be put out of its misery by Apache. Long live Libreoffice.
    VirtualBox - Decent for desktop virtualization and trying out other OSs. No real potential as an enterprise tool. Has somehow avoided getting screwed up by Oracle so far, but I expect the extensions package to monetized and licensed into oblivion any day.
    MySQL - lapped by MariaDB for anyone serious about security (see recent root access exploit)
    ZFS on Linux would be a non-issue if a company other than Oracle was involved in the matter.

    • ZFS on Linux would be a non-issue if a company other than Oracle was involved in the matter.

      Sun purposely made the license incompatible with Linux.

    • by aralin ( 107264 )

      I wish you were right, but Java is far from dead. Every single fucking application in the Enterprise is written in that piece of bloatware and half of the SaaS world uses it too. Not to mention that all Oracle apps, all Android apps, ... Google is really heavy on it. I mean... why? *sigh*

      • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        I wish you were right, but Java is far from dead.

        Agreed. The problem is that there are insufficient practical alternatives for those who want strong-typed and/or compiled languages.

        C-sharp is also proprietary. I don't see any on the horizon that have enough market share to make them safe "enterprise" investments.

        Part of the problem is that a static language is harder to design and get right than a dynamic one. Dynamic languages are easier to fudge and plug the holes of with dynamacy itself.

        If one thing is

    • I somewhat recently tried to suggest VirturalBox as an enterprise tool to solve a particular problem with incompatible OS deployments and a legacy application... I was pretty much told to take a hike by security... :(

      i.e. local security policy disables virturalization in an enterprise desktop environment and there was zero willingness to change that

      I liken Java not so much as being "Dead" but rather "Undead" in that Zombie language seems to be impossible to kill without a direct headshot

  • I'm looking to migrate to a small cloud server and AWS seemed very expensive to me. I was surprised that such a large company could not beat a smaller one suck as Linode on price. I have no allegiances, so Oracle is either going to cheaper and more useful, or more expensive and less useful. Most people will base their opinions solely on that. So the question is, has Larry talked price yet?
    • by Bigbutt ( 65939 )

      Yea, I looked over moving my personal physical server over to an AWS instance and the cost of AWS for an equivalent system was double what I'm paying for a physical system.

      What I'd really need to do is take what I have on this system and start reviewing the costs of putting the bits in various services on the 'net. It's possible I can have it cost less by splitting up what I do but it would certainly complicate managing the environment.

      [John]

      • I've read some interesting things about bittorrent filesystems, sounds like it's the kind of thing you're looking for. Your files get encrypted and broken up into the torrentsphere. I haven't tried them personally, but some people seem to like them.
      • On AWS you're paying a premium for the ability to scale. The entire design is for dynamic computing requirements, such as ad-hoc computation or solutions that need to temporarily scale (think of Amazon's ecommerce site itself). If you just need a fixed number of servers it's not the economical choice.

      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        I've been looking at that as well. Depending on instance type, the 3-year contracts can be pretty cheap if paid upfront. I want a little web server for some toy pages (and I don't just want to put the pages somewhere - I want to play with different host stacks/frameworks). If I can fit in 1 GB that's about $150 for three years.

        If you really want a server, scroll through all the reserved instance prices looking for what's deeply discounted. There are some good prices here and there IMO. Just remember th

    • by jon3k ( 691256 )
      You're not really the target customer. For a single VM there are probably cheaper options. When you want a few hundred or thousand (reserved [amazon.com]) instances and negotiated pricing, AWS becomes very competitive.
      • Yet I've read if you go much past $10K/year you might as well have your own servers. Especially if you can do your own administration.
        • by jon3k ( 691256 )
          Got a source for that figure? There are a lot of financial considerations around moving to the cloud. Like moving from capital to operational expenses and the flexibility to scale up/down with M&A or divestitures. Sometimes the flexibility provided by PaaS can deliver much better value to an organization.
          • No source that I would be able to find again.. but I saw three similar separate kinds of comments with 10-15K being the general cutoff point.
            • by jon3k ( 691256 )
              I don't believe anyone could claim a single number would be applicable to all environments. I don't buy that at all, to be honest.
  • Oracle... Thinks it now has a lead over Amazon.... BWAHAHAHAHA.

    *wipes tear*

    Sure, I would love to pay 100x market price for equivalent service without any value-add! Really!

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      You don't get it. Oracle's cloud is Uncle Larry's ego. It has infinite storage capacity, able to out-lie even Trump, and is more irritating than Jeff Bezos.

    • by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      " 28.8TB, 512GB, and 36 cores, at a price of $5.40 per hour."

      Sure, I would love to pay 100x market price for equivalent service without any value-add! Really!

      Where do you get those specs in a server for $0.054 per hour? I'll move my stuff to there (unless it's your basement).

      • Well, I was being facetious. Everything else Oracle does comes with ludicrous costs. Even if their upfront cost is cheap, once they are entrenched they will tighten the vice and milk you for everything you've got.

        Oracle doesn't do *anything* unless they heavily weigh it in their favour. They make Microsoft look like the Make-a-Wish foundation.

        So even if their cloud prices look good, there's gonna be a catch somewhere. It may not be immediate, but it will most certainly be there somewhere.

  • by frank_adrian314159 ( 469671 ) on Monday September 19, 2016 @05:49PM (#52919797) Homepage

    Why would anyone want to do business with Larry Ellison and Oracle? Cyanide's preferable.

  • "New cloud provider guy says those other cloud provider guys are no good"; film at 11.

  • Larry Ellison says a lot of things. Some of the may even be true, but I doubt this one is.

  • This is the point of the story where Reacher Gilt unveils his plans for new mobile clacks towers.
  • Oracle: hey, rent this hardware for 10x the capex+opex.

    Seriously, Amazon is making a killing from cloud, so how surprising is it that other companies want some of that honey?

    This server costs about $12k, and would cost the standard 10%/year to power and cool.
    Yet over a 3-year rental life, Oracle is charging $142k.

  • As usual, ever since he became CEO, Larry Ellison is full of shit. He's the imaginably the closest living CEO to Dilbert's one.

  • I worked for Oracle, in the team that developed this. WIthout smearing my former employer too much... I would not advise anybody to choose Oracle cloud.

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