back to article Oracle and Dell forge worldwide server alliance

Dell and Oracle are teaming up on x86 servers, and Dell is set to develop a new "infrastructure offering" specifically for Oracle's database software. In other words, if you were planning on buying one of Oracle's standalone servers rather than a bundled system, you might want to think twice. The worldwide alliance was …

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  1. Mikel
    Devil

    Yet Another Oracle partnership

    Start the countdown on the inevitable lawsuit between the partners.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Convo overheard in my office two min ago.

    "Oi Bill, Dell and Oracle are now doing x86 servers together." (Bill's the Director of IT)

    "F--- off."

    "I'm serious. Here, look at the article."

    (Long pause as he reads)

    "So wot you thinking?"

    "Who is our HP sales rep?"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Convo overheard in my office two min ago.

      Out of the frying pan and into the fire

  3. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Pirate

    The death knell for SPARC.

    That's it, it's all over! Oracle is throwing in the towel on servers. There is no way they can carry on funding the blackhole that is CMT when they will be building all their appliances on Dell kit within a few years. Unless Fudgeitso keep SPARC64 going it is the final curtain for SPARC. So, with Oracle calling it quits and IBM selling out their x86 server bizz to Lenovo, I guess that just leaves Dell and hp to duke it out as the server kings..

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The death knell for SPARC.

      No they haven't given up on servers. If you'd been paying attention to what they have been doing lately you'd see that they have been dropping product lines that aren't developed by them. That's one of the reasons for declining hardware revenues, you don't get revenue for things you don't sell.

      An X86 server would have little Oracle hardware in it, the margins are poor as you're basically repackaging other companies parts and putting your company logo on the front.

      1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: The death knell for SPARC.

        "......they have been dropping product lines....." Yeah, "phased withdrawls", "tactical retreats", bla-bla-bla, all marketing schpiel for "we cannot compete in x64"! Larry needs x64 for his appliances walled garden, so if he can't do it he has to partner with a real x64 vendor like Dell, but doing so removes the economies of scale that prop up the CMT/SPARC farce.

        ".....you don't get revenue for things you don't sell....." Wow, you manage to understand that but STILL refuse to acknowledge that this is Oracle gradually outsourcing their x64 design capability? After the split with hp, and after hp designed the hardware for the original Exacreta appliances, Oracle bragged long and hard that they had bought all the design capabilities they needed with teh Sun purchase, but now they are going back to asking another hardware vendor to build their stacks for them. The reason is they have drained talent that wasn't particularly good at x64 in the first place. Is there any hardware design capability left in Oracle? In a way I actually think it's good as Larry can stop wasting his time trying to fit Hurd into his organisation and get back to concentrating on software.

        ".....An X86 server would have little Oracle hardware in it, the margins are poor as you're basically repackaging other companies parts and putting your company logo on the front." Which is what many pointed out when Larry fitst started blathering on about building x64 servers after buying the Sun carcass. To compete in the x64 market you need the scale of Dell or hp, even IBM are "retreating" from the market. To build SPARC Larry needed an x64 range to spread the costs - without that economy of scale given by a successful x64 range the warped wheels of the CMT bandwagon have well and truly fallen off.

        /SP&L

    2. Phil 4
      WTF?

      Re: The death knell for SPARC.

      Hey Matt-Still working for HP? Hows that working out for you?Hows HP's server business doing today? With over a $1BN being invested in SPARC today by Oracle, and Fujitsu also investing heavily in SPARC, how could you justify such remarks without being seen as a troll?

      My view on things is that Oracle is leaving x86 to Dell, just like TPM points out, so Oracle can focus on Engineered Systems and SPARC. Oracle clearly has Intels roadmaps on x86 futures, and its clear if you look at the entire x86 market, that almost every company that bet on it is suffering today including Dell, IBM and HP. Even IBM is trying to abandon its x86 business to Lenovo and Intel, with its new CEO, is clearly going after ARM, which will continue to defocus them from the enterprise space which has significantly lower volumes which makes it hard for Intel to get any ROI. They’ve already abandoned the science project they called Itanium and its been over two years since they’ve updated its "EX" class of processors, not expecting an update till late this year, maybe early 2014 - 3 years from Westmere-EX. If you look at this weeks Haswell announcement, its all about mobile computing. What about the Enterprise Space?

      1. Matt Bryant Silver badge

        Re: Phil 4 Re: The death knell for SPARC.

        ".....Still working for HP?....." LOL! It looks like the denail is still strong with some Sunshiners. I remember them accusing anyone that pointed out Sun's gradual demise as "working for hp", and it seems time and that experience haven't removed the blinkers.

        ".....With over a $1BN being invested in SPARC today by Oracle....." Really? How much of that is SPARC64 and Japanese government money? Please do supply some actual verifiable facts to back up that whimsy.

        "......My view on things is that Oracle is leaving x86 to Dell, just like TPM points out, so Oracle can focus on Engineered Systems and SPARC......" Hey, do you remember that whole Sunset happening? You remember when Schwartz and Ponytail flipped and flopped between SPARC and x86 and SPARC64 and CMT? And you still don't get a sense of deja vu? Are you even safe to walk out the door with those blinkers so firmly stapled to your head? CMT and SPARC are dying in the market, and Larry is having to plug in Fudgeitso's superior SPARC64 kit again just like Ponytail had to (remember the M3000 fiasco?), but all it is doing is delaying the inevitable. Buckle up, Sunshiners, our inflight movie is "Sunset 2 - The Penguins Win Again"! Enjoy!

        /SP&L whilst stocking up on the popcorn!

        1. Billl
          FAIL

          Re: Phil 4 The death knell for SPARC.

          "LOL! It looks like the denail is still strong with some Sunshiners. I remember them accusing anyone that pointed out Sun's gradual demise as "working for hp", and it seems time and that experience haven't removed the blinkers."

          No, I don't remember too many people being accused of working for HP -- just you Matt. No one spends as much time, as you do, defending a major multinational corporation unless they work for said company or they make a large portion of their career/money via that company.

          I see nothing in this article that Oracle is not still doing their own engineering on the Midsize to Enterprise level engineered systems. Larry has made it clear that the low end of the market is not for him. He has clearly stated that he would like to leave that part of the market to partners. Dell appears to be one of those partners. this deal makes a lot of sense given Oracle's past statements.

          1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
            Happy

            Re: Billl Re: Phil 4 The death knell for SPARC.

            ".....just you Matt....." Oh dear, it seems that those Sunshine Blinkers interfere with your memory as well. Not only have you shrieking frothers accused others here of working for a company when they poked holes in your FUD, but you Sunshiners have also accused me of working for IBM, Intel and Dell! Make your minds up! Everyone that disagrees with your myopic viewpoint is not working for a vendor - get over it.

            "......I see nothing in this article that Oracle is not still doing their own engineering on the Midsize to Enterprise level engineered systems....." Sense of déjà vu? How about when Larry took a statement about Xeon from the Intel Xeon product manager and used it completely out of context to justify a marketing blitz against Itanium-based hp Integrity? Did you Sunshiners stand up and say "hey Larry, that just isn't logical"? No, you all sang the chorus of FUD with glee. Well, what's good for the goose.... Problem for you is this actually just another step in the gradual death of Oracle's server hardware, you know that once they are using Dell there will be no going back, and SPARC in any form will continue to whither and die, just at an accelerated rate. Enjoy!

      2. Allison Park
        Paris Hilton

        Re: The death knell for SPARC.

        The IDC 2012 results for Power, SPARC and Itanium are

        Power = $5.7B, SPARC = $2.6B and Itanium = $1.6B

        obviously if you think SPARC is dead then Itanium is drawn and quartered

        Oracle actually puts money into marketing SPARC, but it is still geting SPANCed by POwer

        Cheers Blokes

        1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
          Facepalm

          Re: Allison Park Re: The death knell for SPARC.

          "The IDC 2012 results....." Nice bit of cherry picking! In 2012 the hp customers were waiting for the new Poulsen 9500 Itaniums which arrived towards the end of the year in November. They were also being subjected to the full force of Larry's FUD machine with his idiotic claim that Itanium was dead - it wasn't until August that hp was able to go back to us customers and show how Larry had been shown to be a liar in court. With all that effort being out in by Oracle (and IBM) to FUD hp Integrity the wonder is there were any sales, but then FUDers like you were insisting no-one was going to buy Tukwilla or Poulsen systems anyway - guess you'll be admitting you were wrong?

          Besides, hp sells Integrity as part of a full server range, including the market-leading x64 offering. IBM are offloading their x64 to Lenovo and Oracle are now buying Dell kit, so who has the economies of scale? Just hp and Dell.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The death knell for SPARC.

      This has nothing to do with hardware. Oracle wants to sell their Oracle Linux and Oracle VM platform. If Dell, or anyone else, wants to create a bundle and push their Linux platform, Oracle is happy to let them sell their software.

  4. Nate Amsden

    Larry never cared about commodity stuff

    I've posted this link a few times in past Oracle articles related to their HW business but El Reg seems to continue to think Oracle gave a crap about the Sun hardware that was not part of engineered systems

    http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000119877&play=1

    Larry himself says he didn't care if that business went to $0.

    So it makes sense they partner with Dell, they obviously aren't close to HP any more, and IBM is big competition as well, so that leaves "little 'ol i-wanna-be-private" Dell.

  5. Gene Cash Silver badge

    "single point of contact from Dell"

    "Have you turned it off and back on?"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "single point of contact from Dell"

      I disagree. When I've had to call Dell for hardware support (M & R series hardware) I've always gotten someone who has me explain what the symptoms are and what I've done so far and knows enough to run through the checklist as a series of questions instead of starting at step 1, which is the use of that 1/0 switch.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I don't see it working out

    Why would any Oracle customer want OS, VM support from Dell as opposed to Oracle direct?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I don't see it working out

      Obviously you've never been a customer that has bought something from Oracle...

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pay attention to SPARC folks..

    The issue is that x86 is on the decline and the margins are razor thin that HP, Dell, and IBM are all having issues with making enough money. When you consider China and white-box vendors coming into the market at rock bottom prices and the rise of ARM.. would you want to bet the farm on x86? Look at Dell, they are going private for a reason:)

    The strategy at Oracle is to focus on SPARC. If you had paid attention to the T5, M5, and M10 launches, you'd see that Oracle is spending serious bank on SPARC. Oracle has delivered on 2x increases in performance with each new line-up.. something that Intel and AMD haven't been able to do for a long long time. And for those who think no one is buying SPARC.. you may be surprised that it's making a resurgence in Banks, Telcos, Retail, and Public Sector.

    The difficult part for Oracle is that with the performance issues sorted out with SPARC and the density being so high for CPU cores, threads, memory, I/O, etc.. you don't need as many SPARC servers to do the job. I've seen many customers consolidate hundreds of SPARC servers onto a handful of new SPARC gear.

    This is the same issue that IBM, Dell, HP, and VMware face today with the Intel chips. You just don't need as many servers as you use to, thanks to virtualization and compute density. The days of companies buying thousands of servers a year are OVER!

    The best place to run Oracle software will be SPARC. Remember how Larry said he wanted Oracle to be like IBM? Well he wasn't talking about IBM's x86 business (which is now Lenovos), he was talking about Power and Mainframes. Welcome to the brave new world where x86 isn't that important!

    1. Denarius
      Thumb Up

      Re: Pay attention to SPARC folks..

      Indeed sir. X86 is continuing to become commodity no matter what the hardware is sold as. Like all commodity industries, the specialists may remain in their niches and a few, very few, will remain. The auto industry, so far, has been an excellent guide to IT hardware industry change.

      Next phase may be where the few surviving large scale generalists begin to absorb the perceived high status niche players. Rolls Royce, Cray anyone ? I wonder if eventually, with X86 vs ARM, SPARC (maybe) and virtualisation, Intel will buy Dell to have a complete supply chain to monitise the tail-end of the X86 PC era ?

      HP, who were they ? Bought out ink sellers, weren't they ? IBM, who knows. So many pies, so many fingers, and even more sales weasels. Some of them very good.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Pay attention to SPARC folks..

      Oracle people might think that but when inside the beast, cannot see whats going on outside.

      Hardware sales decline is a reflection on Oracle itself.

      Peoples support/interaction from Oracle for software and think that dont want more of it (and its cost) for their hardware too.

      Companies built business around Oracle software and cannot move, but x86 hardware they get it from anyone.

      Using Sun hardware and non-Oracle software? Oracle make it cost prohibitive to continue using SPARC . You're not stack customer. There were LOTS of SPARC customers like that. LOTS. Now fewer SPARC customers.

      Nobody wants more Oracle. Nobody.

    3. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: Pay attention to SPARC folks..

      ".....When you consider China and white-box vendors coming into the market at rock bottom prices....." At which point you have to compete on innovation, and when did Oracle innovate anything other than massive costs in the x64 space? White box x86 vendors have always been around. Try another line of FUD, that one has had holes poked in it for decades.

      ".....and the rise of ARM....." LOL! Don't you just love how some people manage to see ARM as always a threat to x86 but somehow it will just leave SPARC and CMT alone? Seriously, CMT is the low-hanging fruit for ARM server vendors, especially as ARM will run Windows or Linux. Oh, and as you seem to have failed to see it past those Sunshiner blinkers of yours, hp have been working on ARM kit for years, but Oracle are not.... (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_servers/)

      "....You just don't need as many servers as you use to, thanks to virtualization and compute density...." You just don't need over-priced SPARC servers that limit your choice of OS and applications, thanks to the virtualisation capabilities and compute density of x64, as proven for years. There, fixed that for you.

      And you don't have to give up your "we don't know anything about hardware" Oracle support for "we don't know anything about software" Dell support, you can simply keep the software support with the software vendors and the hardware support with the hardware vendors.

      ".....The best place to run Oracle software will be SPARC...." The best for who? Maybe you mean the best for Slowaris dinoaurs and Oracle server salesgrunts trying to make it through to retirement?

      1. Dominion

        Re: Pay attention to SPARC folks..

        ".....The best place to run Oracle software will be SPARC...." The best for who?

        The best for anyone that wants to build a mission critical system that actually does the job it's designed to do. x64 and Linux doesn't do that - it's still a poor excuse for 'Enterprise class'. Nothing in RHEL5 / 6 and their OEL counterparts gives me any reason to think otherwise.

        1. rch

          Re: Pay attention to SPARC folks..

          ##Nothing in RHEL5 / 6 and their OEL counterparts gives me any reason to think otherwise.

          Well, Solaris and RHEL/OEL are strikingly similar in the sense that none of them supports upgrade of major versions. Solaris 10 to Solaris 11 requires reinstall so does RHEL5 to RHEL6. But i will give Solaris credit for the fact that a patch upgrade usually does not break things as is the case with RHEL.

          A reinstall could take weeks considering all third party software, drivers and configuration. A real enterprise OS does upgrade of major version leaving all config and software working and takes 30 minutes One such example is AIX.

  8. M. B.

    I was there dude...

    ...consensus is that the move makes sense for Oracle to get out of low margin hardware sales and for Dell to sell their low margin hardware into more data centers.

    I don't think we'll see any changes to SPARC availability in the near future as that is a different market altogether.

  9. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    Hmmm

    Oradell? Decle?

    Sounds bad either way.

  10. Eradicate all BB entrants

    Ah Dell ......

    ..... who insisted I should update the bios on a DOA monitor before they would provide an RMA. Who's 4 hour mission critical service isn't we will fix it in 4 hours, just that the 4 hours is for us to tell someone to fix it, and you also have to tell them it's mission critical.

    Good luck with that

  11. DBJDBJ

    nobody mentions Google here ?

    in danger of sounding pompous , let us be clear : 1. NoSQL is very serious, 2: end of big expensive servers is few years away. Everything comes to its end, incuding Oracle and including Dell. Everybody will have a hard time trying to combat GOOG with its wast cloud, and with zero SQL inside and zero classical servers in it.

  12. Fenton

    Microsoft

    I bet Microsoft which they hadn't stumpped up the cash to help fund the Dell buy back.

  13. Paul Johnston
    Pint

    Sorry this article is wrong!

    Anyone else get a letter from Carolyne Jones saying:

    You may have seen today a story on ‘TheRegister’ saying that Dell & Oracle were forging a partnership on X86 that intimated that Dell were taking over Oracle X86 hardware production. This is not the case. Dell will have the right to sell X86 systems with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM into Dell’s own customer base, but this agreement does NOT extend to Solaris.

  14. Jason 5
    Trollface

    Fusion logo spelling error - fixed

    Dell-b-acle

    Do you really need an explanation?

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