Oracle reveals cloudy engineered systems

No thank you. One question ...

What idiot corporation requires a third-party to provide connectivity & memory?

Answer: A corporation that doesn't employ actual IT folks.

The crash currently being "engineered" by manglement & marketards is going to be spectacular ... and quite profitable, to those of us with a clue :-)

Larry wants Oracle to be IBM

Oracle gets loads of cash from its database. That, plus mercilessly milking their software acquisitions, helps them offset the losses incurred by all their hardware adventures. One wonders when Larry is going to try something that fails so spectacularly as to actually impact the bottom line. Oh well, Larry is one big shareholder anyway.

Anyway, Oracle wants to be IBM, yet they forget that they became who they are precisely because people were running away from IBM, their mainframes and their high costs. Not many customers are buying into the end to end model of having the same supplier for the hardware, the software and the support. Guess why? Because they do not want another IBM.

The shape of the pie

This would be a good article if it had included at least a little arithmetic following mention of the fact that Oracle Database licenses need to be capitalized in this "solution.". The recipe Oracle would have in mind for you includes Enterprise Edition, Real Application Clusters, Partitioning and In-Memory Database Cache thus the cost per core is US$105,000 *.5 == $52,500 (.5 is the "core factor"). Indeed, I threw in In-Memory Database Cache option because Oracle markets the current Exadata Database Machine as the "Exadata X3 In-Memory Database Machine."

One only needs to activate 32 of the 128 compute-grid processor cores in the X3-2 model to equal the hardware cost of an entire rack of Exadata (which is US$168,000,000).

"These days every million counts and any shift from the capital expense of the ledger to the operating expenses is welcomed, Juan Loaiza, senior vice president of systems technology at Oracle, told El Reg."

This has not been my experience. When you move a purchase from capital to operational, you lose all of the depreciation benefits of a capital purchase. Most companies have so much cash on hand that they are trying to find good uses for their cash. As demand is down, they don't want to take their cash and invest it in business expansion. It is not as though deciding to buy new systems means you can't expand that factory, because, in a recession, you are not expanding any factories or distribution hubs or the like. I suppose there are those businesses that are in financial straights and do not have the cash on hand, but, in that case, it is supremely unlikely they would be buying an Exa as it is extremely costly, CoD or no CoD.