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Oracle promises golden trip to yesteryear on Sun

Oracle's promised to take computing back to the 1960s by investing in Sun Microsystems' products and integrating them with its own software. Calling IBM the "gold-standard" for stable and reliable computing during those early days, Oracle president Charles Philips said Wednesday morning that his company would achieve its goal …

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Anonymous Coward
Happy

I need an analysis....

Yo! Mattie boy, got any worthwhile off the shelf comments? Na, thought not. Eat our dirt HP/IBM

Marketing Hack
Linux

We'll see how it works.....

I think systems integrated at the engineering level are great, but are customers really excited about a return to the classic IBM model, where you are in hock to one vendor for everything? I think its a situational or app-level play. If Oracle gets serious about cloud this might be a little more customer-friendly.

Linux Penguin, because this is the only time you will be seeing him in anything related to Oracle/Sun :)

Anonymous Coward
Stop

Still full of doubt or other stuff

How many people at Sun will get letter #3?

- It looks like 10,000 people will be let go while Oracle puts job posts out for chip people they cannot get from Intel. Hiring 2,000 people for a 130,000 person company is not

Fujitsu SPARC64

- I was not impressed with the comments about the m-class. It looks like Venus is canceled and there will only be minor <10% speed bumps on the current chip. Sun did the same thing after they canceled USV.

IBM can only scale to one system...Larry you should get up to date.

- Funny the IBM rep was by last year and told us about PrueScale which is better than Oracle RAC because it is the mainframe cluster technology.

Exadata V2

- Not convinced Oracle will keep their x86 product line since last month Larry said they will no longer compete in the traditional x86 server market. How will they pay for the systems when they only sell about 25 exadata's per year and I heard a lot of them were given away.

Solaris

- is unbreakable-Linux dead? or is Solaris on SPARC dead? I forsee a lot of dead products ahead.

$1.5B in profit year one

- Every other company they bought was at least profitable. The only thing I heard was they were going to dump their business partners and that is how they will make a profit.

Matt Bryant
WTF?

Percentiles mean nothing.

Seeing as hp's and IBM's revenues have been much larger than Sun's for years, comparing percentages is silly. It also doesn't seem to reflect the effectiveness of the research - both IBM and hp seem to have done a lot better out of their research, probably through having better processes and better people and thus using less money to get better results. All Sun seems to have done is waste a lot of money, either on dead-end research projects or loony purchases. And the one thing they didn't buy which they should have, and which Oracle also doesn't have, is a services capability (unlike IBM and hp).

And as for Mr Phillips wanting to go back to the '60s, that only happened because IBM effectively had a complete monopoly with the mainframe, whereas if Oracle try and make their software so closed it will only run on Slowaris they'll be dead by this time next year. Whilst Phillips should know this, Sun definately do as it was the availability of UNIX from many companies such as Sun that broke IBM's stranglehold. Merely saying "I want to build a new monopoly" is laughable when you don't have anything to build with. The majority of Oracle's new installs go onto x64 adn Windows, and Sun is so far behind the curve there it's beyond comic. And then if we look at RISC the picture is even funnier - no future SPARC64 yet; Rock is dead; and Niagara doesn't scale. And Soreacle doesn't have the time to play catch-up as a Nehalem EX box will outperform any current SPARC short of an M9000 anyway.

Looks like more laughs yet!

David Halko
Go

R&D Increasing...

"Phillips committed Oracle to spending 19 per cent of its total annual revenue on R&D, based on fiscal 2009 - the most recent annual numbers... In Oracle's fiscal year 2011, it will spend $4.5bn on R&D, up from $2.8bn in 2009. That compares to a steady $2.7 to 2.8bn in the years before."

Well, it is good to see that Sun will be expanding it's R&D!

I can't wait to see what comes out!

Allison Park
FAIL
Reply Icon

R&D is not increasing

Phillips said Oracle plans to spend $4.3B on R&D, up from $2.8B before the acquisition.

Sun was spending $1.6B in R&D.

==========================

$2.8+$1.6B=$4.4B

$4.3B "plan" is less than the combined and considering how far behind SPARC technology is compared to POWER and Nehalem they would need to increase R&D significantly.

They also have no control over SPARC64 which Fujitsu owns and the best they could say is there will be a few small speed increases.

Ivan Hallworth
Thumb Up

Good News

Oracle have given Sun a stay of execution.

Agree there's a lot of catching up for them to do and no real answers to 'Venus'.

Are Oracle Microelectronics going to attempt to go it alone post SPARC64-VII?

How close are Oracle and Fujitsu cooperating? Close cooperation could greatly help both in the competition with IBM, HP, others.

Can it be done? Sure! Easy? Certainly not! But there is a chance and a hope.

Good news if Oracle-Sun is a success for customers and also for the industry as they can help improve overall industry competition. Without Oracle-Sun it tends toward an Intel, IBM duopoly and that can't be good news . . . for anyone.

Yes, Oracle should give up low end x86.

Sun have good storage solutions even with the loss of momentum due to the acquisition uncertainties.

Good news the investment in R&D by Oracle in Oracle-Sun and potentially good news for some employees and jobs.

An stronger Oracle-Fujitsu cooperative alliance could do wonders to help compete with IBM, HP.

Its likely we'll know for sure and reasonably quickly if this new Oracle strategy is going to work.

Gripfast and godspeed!

Kebabbert

Mattie Pattie Laddie

"...It also doesn't seem to reflect the effectiveness of the research - both IBM and hp seem to have done a lot better out of their research, probably through having better processes and better people and thus using less money to get better results..."

Now you are lying. SUN is famed for their research and their technological innovation. ZFS, DTrace, Niagara, etc are ground breaking. Everyone is trying to copy ZFS. IBM is trying to copy DTrace with their ProbeVue copy. Niagara has for long advocated many cores, at a lower Hz - whereas IBM has shunned down on that - saying that few fast cores is the way to go. And now, suddenly, IBM has changed their mind and clocked down the POWER7 and added lots of cores. That is just hilarious. When SUN does something, it is bad. But when IBM later does the exact same thing - it is the best since sliced bread?

And at the same time you talk about IBM having better research than SUN? Who are you trying to fool? Jesus, Mattie. Do you still believe that POWER6 which gets beaten by Intel Nehalem and by Niagara, does not suffer from cache misses? Do you still believe all IBM propaganda?

Gege
Alert
Reply Icon

some moderation

Dear Kebabbert,

I'm not having any doubt about the fact that SUN is making a lot of researches but you should be a bit more moderate when talking about SUN in general. Did SUN invent a brainwash machine ?

Check this link:

http://www.ificlaims.com/IFI%202009%20patents%20011210%20final.htm

This is a company ranking based on the amount of patents in the U.S.

Did you ever heard something about IBM GPFS and the way the IBM AS/400 is working since many years. If I'm not wrong, I think the first multi-core CPU was a Power one (I'm not 100% sure about it but some searches on the web seems to confirm it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_processor).

So, please, don't be so extreme in your posting. You don't have to convince me that SUN is having good research and development but you should admit that SUN is not the only one ... and maybe not the best ...

When I read your comments about the various articles, I'm thinking about Icarus ... You are flying so close to the SUN ... do not loose your wings !

oh, I forgot to mention: the first multi threading researches ... guess what ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_multithreading

The PC you are using ... (if you don't know it): http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blibm.htm

The first disk storage system ... http://inventors.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.research.ibm.com/know/top.html

The first disk drive with air bearing ...

Check this link about the history of computers: http://inventors.about.com/library/blcoindex.htm

oups, they forgot SUN .... you should contact them ....

Do you need some more evidence or do you believe in world conspiracy against SUN ?

By the way, I made a google search on SUN invention (like I did for IBM) and I found this one:

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa071401a.htm

OK, I'm kidding you :-)

Here are some real ones:

http://www.wikipatents.com/as/s_assignee/Sun+Microsystems,+Inc.

http://web.me.com/curbow/Podcasting/index.html

-> you now have some more material for further discussions :-)

Cheers.

Matt Bryant
FAIL

RE: Mattie Pattie Laddie

Kebabfart speaks from the Land Of Denial once again!

"....Now you are lying...." Well, profit figures don't lie. IBM and hp have been making profits of the back of their innovations and research (especially off that hp printer ink - I know how much that upsets you Sunshiners), whilst Sun hasn't made a profit for years. Innovation without profit is just wasting money, no matter how you want to dress it up.

"....ZFS, DTrace, Niagara, etc are ground breaking....." ZFS is a clone of WAFL, which is why NetApp are chasing Sun through the courts. Even then, Sun give ZFS away for free - not a good way to make profits. DTrace gets a lot of hype from Sunshiners but hasn't stopped the continued slide in Slowaris server sales. Sun ships five times as many x64 servers with Linux as it does with Slowaris even though the Slowaris version has DTrace and ZFS. So even your own customers know you're talking male bovine manure. And as for Niagara, what is so ground-breaking about a chip that doesn't scale past four sockets (and you had to hack out half the memory controllers, halving the memory bandwidth to get there), and costs five times as much as an x64 server that does the job better? Niagara will stumble on for a while in the webserving niche but it's a dead-end, it will never generate the volumes to gain the economies of scale to fight Xeon or Opteron. Don't believe me? Then go look round your own datacenter and count the number of Wintel servers and then the number of Niagara boxes, you'll soon realise who's winning.

As for Power, the idea of Niagara even being mentioned in the same conversation is laughable. Niagara can't handle the heavy, single-threaded apps that Power, Itanium, Xeon and Opteron churn through, the kind of apps customers are using now and plan on using for the foreseeable future. Outside of webserving, Niagara is an afterthought.

But we'll see in due course. After all, you Sunshiners said UltraSPARC V wouldn't be cancelled, that Rock wouldn't either, and that Sun wasn't in trouble and would not be sold. So far you're zero-for-three, I'm quite happy to bet you'll be zero-for-four on Niagara too!

/SP&L.

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