IBM is pretty much pricing themselves out of business.

IBM is pretty much pricing themselves out of business. Why would i buy an eight cylinder car and be allow to only use one cylinder. You can pretty much any decent x86_64 system for peanuts with the same number of cores as their low config and still survive. IBM has gotten a bit too big for themselves forgetting the small businesses in the process.

true...

It's frustrating to be a former Sun now Oracle customer - especially if you have no intention of buying Oracle software.

FWIW, AMD is gone from Oracle's line up. The 6100's will never see the light of day in an Oracle product. The writing is on the wall (look at all of the EOL notices.) Oracle will be Intel only for x86. I don't have any special knowledge of this, but if the 7000 series storage goes Intel as I suspect it will, my educated guess will be confirmed.

It would be nice to be able to buy a Westmere based Oracle product, but alas, that's still a pipe dream.

Oracle will be down to one product soon

Oracle only cares about Exadata and that is only because it drives software revenue.

Every client rep had to have a proposal on the customers desk by end of December or they don't get any commission dollars.

Every client has to have a proof of concept or a customer workload benchmark or they cannot go to the sales club event.

Every Sun sales rep (the few that are left) have to sell at least one Exadata by end of May or their job and certainly their territory will be in jeopardy.

The m-class systems are of no interest to Oracle and will go the same way as the Hitachi storage very soon.