HP's Intanium Systems have no Integrity

Notice how Intel was very careful not to commit to the Itanium chips....just the HP operating systems.

Paul Otellini, president and CEO of Intel Corporation “We remain firmly committed to delivering a competitive, multi-generational roadmap for HP-UX and other operating system customers that run the Itanium architecture.”

Matt B....we will miss you

Moo?

It's the same thing as the only platform HPUX ships on is Itanium-based Integrity. If I were an Oracle customer (I'm not) this would truly piss me off. Most of them have to feep like their being herded down a cattle chute about now..

Timing is everything

Today was HP's annual stockholder meeting. Oracle's timing is Larry and Mark's ultimate payback FU to HP.

Ho-hum!

I warned a while back that this was the last thing I wanted Oracle to do - break their DB product. I don't see how Larry thiks this will benefit Oracle, if there's anything we couldn't move onto Xeon then it would be going to Power, not SPARC in any form. This does remind me of the kerfuffle around Slowaris x86, where Snoreacle said they were dropping hp's license to support Slowaris on ProLiant, then a few weeks late it was all back on when hp stumped up a larger license fee. Maybe this is just another extortion attempt by Larry, but it just makes him look rather desperate if he thinks this is the only way he can sell SPARC servers!

You can see why he didn't try it with IBM - they have DB2. Maybe it's time for hp to buy a database company. Of course, the fun starts if Leo goes and buys SAP and a database company, then drops SAP support for Oracle, then I'd really have a ton of migrating work to do! Either way, I expect I'm going to have a busy year trying out the options. As usual, the last person Larry thinks about is the customer.

RE: Moo?

".......the only platform HPUX ships on is Itanium-based Integrity....." Try a little reading, there's both OpenVMS and NonStop running on Integrity, and both are often used with Oracle.

Reading?

Um.. the NonStop is *based* on Integrity systems and OpenVMS runs *on* Integrity. No additional reading on my part required..

Uhmmm

You do realize that Oracle now owns Sun and this includes Sun's hardware business?

Do you honestly think that if HP invited Oracle to the party that the Oracle shark er sales rep wouldn't hesitate to try and sell Sun hardware in to the deal?

RE: Uhmmm

Well, considering the majority of the old Oracle reps don't have a clue about hardware, and the few ex-Sun ones that made it alive into Oracle only seem to have done so because they didn't have anywhere else to run to.....

Guys you do know..

That there is such a thing as history.. just cause Oracle got SUN's HW business doesn't mean that HP hardware sales reps' haven't spend quite a lot of years before that going to marked together, for example to try to replace a Mainframe installation with DB2.

Now, I have yet to meet a Oracle sales rep who had just the faintest clue about HW, so what is his options ?

What you guys aren't realizing is that Oracle also just raised the price on Itanium, so the sales rep is more than happy to sell Oracle on HP Itanium. And now he has to compete with not just SAP and IBM, no he has bloody the whole industry after him.

And sure you say that he can just push a Exadata solution. Sure.. yeah but that is a tough sale, it's expensive and cannot really be used for anything else than an Oracle solution stack.

And a friend of mine who's an Oracle consultant (doesn't work for Oracle), wasn't to fond of the support contract terms.

// Jesper

Linux ++

Surely x86 will be seen as the safe bet?

RE: Linux ++

Well, maybe not, at least not for Larry. The question that's got everyone thinking here is how far is Larry willing to push it? Suppose he doesn't stop at Itanium, or even Power, what if he gets really uppitty and starts pushing CMT by either bumping up the license costs on x64, whether it's on Linux or Windoze? Could it get to the point where Oracle is only available on SPARC in some form, or x64 only if it's Larry's Untakeable Linux or Slowaris, and you have to like it or lump it? That's not an idea we like, we got badly burnt in the past by being too dependent on Sun so we like to keep options and choices available. Suddenly the question becomes how hard would it be to unplug Oracle, and the answer is painful but not impossible.

Too late!

Stopped using the term Microprocessor when I started dealing with the 68000, it really doesn't apply to anything beyond 8 bit computing and the earlier 808x range (8086, 8088). If you want to be picky and what is a processor and what is a microprocessor, maybe an on-wafer FPU should act as the deciding factor...

Depends...

Depends on why you think they're called *micro*processors. If it's because of the scale of the individual transistors on the chip, maybe we should be calling them nanoprocessors now, since the process size used in processor chips has shrunk over the last 30 years or so from microns to nanometres.

No!

Not until they have a de facto monopoly on database sales. But damn close, none the less. Or you could argue the other way - maybe HP should be shipping alternative versions of these Itanium based servers using other processors... eggs, baskets and all that...

Does the US Navy hire legionaires ?

If that gets one to have a few shots at Larry's yacht it'll be worth going through the drill. Can't be any worse than working for Oracle, anyway. Sign me up !

if ???

WTF? *If* Itanium takes off ???

You know it's 2011, right?

kurkosdr

Did you write this 10 years ago?

I suggest you take a look at the latest matket share figures

SPARC revenue is now significantly lower than Itanium revenue - based on that argument if Oracle was really going to end of life one of its development platforms, it should have been SPARC.

No, this is Larry saying, I can't win fair, so I'll win dirty... ANYONE who trusts Oracle to do the right thing by them now is on to a loser, when Larry said he wanted to be like the old IBM, he meant becoming a monopolist...

Time to look at Sybase, Ingres, DB2, Informix - basically anything but Oracle

RE: Support is very costly

Dunnie, your argument doesn't hold water. For a start, the majority of the task is the initial code base for UNIX, which should be pretty common for AIX, SPARC-Slowaris and hp-ux. The real work is done later when the code is optimised for each platform, and I'm told a lot of that is done by hp for the hp-ux versions. It probably costs a massive amount more to try and make the base code for CMT, which is very different to classic EPIC/RISC CPU code. If it was merely an economic argument then Larry would have stopped development on CMT and sold what little was left of the Sun hardware carcass to Fudgeitso. Maybe this is an attempt to make hp buy the Sun hardware bizz, like Oracle wanted hp to do in the first place, or maybe Larry is trying to force hp into supporting Slowaris on Itanium. I'm told by the hp and IBM reps that they had a big target for the year - all the customers still on SPARC-Slowaris - but it looks like Larry has just given the IBM and hp sales teams a new set of opportunities - all those accounts using Oracle that can be sold DB2 or M$ SQL instead!

Numbers

By your logic, Oracle should have dropped SPARC, not Itanium. Itanium passed SPARC in revenue and units shipped in 2008 or so..

Kiralexi - Wrong way round..

No one care's about what OS is running, that's the whole point here!!!

App's rule the roost, what hardware and OS is driving them is irrelevent. Oracle customers will switch OS/hardware far, far faster than they switch database.....Larry knows this, hence him playing this card.

I work for one of the biggest yank banks going, the Oracle DB is not going anywhere (even our Sybase is phasing out to be replaced by Oracle), whereas Solaris and AIX is going out of the door for the low end DB's and middleware to be replaced by Red Hat.

Our M9000's running our biggest DB's will eventually be replaced....by another big SPARC box, why? Intel cannot scale x86 that big. The day it does is the day we will buy it. What chance POWER did have to replace the big M-series box's is now dead, as Oracle will simply price their hardware lower than (the admittedly better) P-Series to keep us on SPARC, and they will be doing this for every account going.

RE: Kiralexi - Wrong way round..

".....Oracle will simply price their hardware lower than (the admittedly better) P-Series to keep us on SPARC....." Yeah, and that strategy worked so well for Sun! Oops! - no it didn't, even trying to flog their kit 20% lower than IBM or hp still didn't save Sun. Walking around with their pants round their ankles just made Sun fall over all the faster.

Take my company as a case study, we're the enterprise type of bizz Larry will want to sell SPARC to, and we run a lot of Oracle on Integrity and Power. Consider the options:

1. Stay on hp-ux on Itanium and find another DB (we don't really use much else from Oracle), but then we'd have to revalidate the app stack. Painful, messy, and risky to data, but we do have DB2 tested and ready to go. I'm grinding my teeth at that idea, but it's bearable, the main risk is in getting the data out of Oracle and into DB2. A loser for Oracle.

2. Stay with Oracle DB, just move to another server platform. Not as painful as we already have IBM Power scoped as a backup choice, but no win for Oracle there then unless they also bump up license costs on Power, and they just make the board twitchy about trusting Oracle.

3. Larry's preferred option - replace all the hp-ux kit with Slowaris on SPARC. Not even on the table, for so many reasons, but mainly because Power is such a better option.

4. Switch to x64 where we can. Very painful, more so than the switch to Power. Larry still wouldn't win anything here, in fact he would probably lose more as going to x64 leads to all kinds of unfavourable comparisons with M$ SQL and/or FOSS alternatives. The x64 option gives far more choices for moving away from Oracle, not towards them.

All in all, this strategy seems to benefit IBM more than Oracle. Larry's not stupid, at least not THAT stupid, so I'm guessing there must be more going on here.

Perhaps... he went to far this time our old frind larry

Well perhaps he went to far this time.

Had a client meeting here the other day with one of our big clients, and funny enough the balance had changed. The Oracle DBA's who normally get to do pretty much what they want. And they aren't that bright.. sorry.. "We need RAM disks to place tablespaces for sorting on, disk is slow so we need RAM disks' .. gee dorks.

But this time the tables had turned, it was actually the Infrastructure architects (an old UNIX guys) who had the final say. And the message was quite clear, help us dear outsoucing partner, how do we pay less in Oracle licenses.

Now I had a field day :)=

// jesper

RE: SP&L or whatever....

I'm guesing the whole "split-brain" thing included a large amount of memory loss? For those with a short memory, go back and look at Larry's flip-flops over RedHat - first he loved them, then he hated them, then they partnered with them, then they did an attack campaign on them, etc, etc. It's almost a shame that hp-ux doesn't have a monkey as a mascot like Tux the Linux penguin, as I think Larry would look just right in a monkey suit for when he is forced to flip back behind hp-ux!

RE: Perhaps... he went to far this time our old frind larry

I'm dusting off the report on the last POC we did with DB2. Just been asked to run through it again. Damn you, Larry, I was looking forward to a quiet Summer!