Posts by Billl
126 posts • joined Wednesday 15th July 2009 16:37 GMT
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.
Re: HAHAHAHAA!
Itanic.
'nuf said
I may not trust Google or any other Corporation...
but at least they can't arrest me based upon what they perceive as inappropriate, or literally hold a gun to my head. They'll merely try to profit from my depravity. If a corporation is bad, then we at least have a chance of punishing them via the government or lawsuit (courts), while if the government is bad what recourse do we have... especially in a totalitarian government?
Re: Alpha....
"end of the RISC development capability."
Huh? End of the RISC development capability? What does that even mean? Most/All of the interesting things being done in chips today is in the RISC world (ARM, Power, Sparc, MIPS even). I don't really understand what your comment means.
Re: "Such moves have given Al Jazeera a spotty reputation among Americans..."
........ who believe that "Freedom of Expression" means "Freedom to say only the things that we agree with..."...
Freedom of speech means you can say anything you want and the government cannot stop you (of course, vulgarity appears to be a blaring exception). It does not mean that other citizens cannot disagree with you and voice their disagreement. If I disagree with you, I can choose to boycott you and/or your product. That is not censorship.
An example of Censorship is not allowing the press to say something controversial about the Royal Family... or even the government ownership of the major News Organization in a country. The second being less obvious, but even more insidious. If the government gives money to a News Org, then the government can withhold that money, and don't think that the News Org does not know that and act accordingly.
Re: Oracle, .... a busted flush with no future leading IP
>I heard the cloud services team is being forced to use Exa-data and Exa-Logic to double count the hardware >dollars and cloud dollars. Rumor also has it they are not happy with Sun x86 hardware. Notice how they said >Sun hardware.
I only notice how you say these things. You like to say "I heard" allot and then act like it's fact.
I have it on great authority that the Exa-folks are very happy with the Sun Hardware, especially when compared with what they got from HP. I don't have to make up "rumors".
Re: Oracle, .... a busted flush with no future leading IP
What utter nonsense. I've never seen Oracle invest in the future more. The Cloud is growing faster for Oracle than other cloud vendors, Fusion is starting to take hold, R&D has been in the 1-1.2 Billion range each quarter for the past two years (that's well over 4 billion a year in R&D). That's all investment in the future. That's in line with IBM, almost double SAP, and about 25% more than HP.
Re: "unbreakable" kernel
Welcome to Linux (not just OEL). I love the idea of Linux, and I love much of the execution, but Linux in general is lacking the serviceability of other OS's.
Re: Proud... I would be too, but
This assumes that Communism with a Capitalist/Slave Labor tilt will win out in the end. Russia fell as they tried to compete in the world market with a faulty moral/economic model. China will have a top and in the short term may be successful, but long term will fall as every Communist country has or will. The only thing that could stop this from happening is if the free countries move more toward communism... wait a second...
Re: VAT
So, how do you measure the profit here then? Obviously it is not $4.1B as some here seem to think. I'm not saying they shouldn't pay more taxes, but it is not the £400M in taxes as some seem to think it should be.
I've seen some different profit margins quoted for Google (between 13%-33.3%), but Forbes puts Googles pre-tax profit margins at 33.3%... So to be fair, Googles taxable amount would actually be closer to $1.36B. I believe that the Corporate tax rate in the UK is 26%, which I doubt most corporations actually pay, but stay with me here. Even at that amount, Google would pay at most $355M in corporate tax - somewhere around £220M.
Re: Matt: Lies, damn lies and marketing
Written by an Ex-Sun person, but referencing studies done by others that were not from Sun. Nice try Matt. Your FUDing abilities have improved.
So you're a denier then, huh? You seriously think that bit-rot does not exist? Okay. Good for you and your company. ZFS may not be the only answer, though btrfs seems to think it's important, as does Symantec (Volume Manager) as they have been attempting to also solve this problem.
Perhaps a CERN Study on Data Integrity is better for you?
http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?contribId=3&sessionId=0&resId=1&materialId=paper&confId=13797
Do you seriously not think that bits flipping under the cover of your RAID is not a potentially huge problem?
Re: Matt: Lies, damn lies and marketing
Woohoo! That makes me feel better. Matt's never seen bit-rot before. I was relying on studies like the ones described here:
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1866298
I can rest better now that I know Matt has never seen data corruption caused by bit-rot.
Posted in Oracle nudges Sparc T5s back out to 2013
Re: Take no bets -- tom 99
Actually, I think they're pretty clear to state that those numbers are relative to the previous version.
re: These sort of things make it cloudy:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/08/22/software-defined-networking-enabled->in-windows-server-2012-and-system-center-2012-sp1-virtual-machine-manager.asp
Solaris - Zones -- Check
http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/05/03/building-cloud-infrastructure-with-windows-server-2012-and-system-center-2012-sp1.aspx
I didn't read this whole link, but it just looks like a whitepaper on how to setup clouds using Windows?
That's not a feature, it's a whitepaper!
Give me a second to search on a Solaris Cloud Whitepaper....
Yes, there's some:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/documentation/whitepapers-1536169.html
Solaris - Cloud Whitepaper - Check
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/documentation/o11-106-sol11-cloud-501066.pdf
Network virtualization. Really? Microsoft's delivered where Solaris has not?
Please see:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/documentation/o11-137-s11-net-virt-mgmt-525114.pdf
Solaris - Network virtualization - Check
So, could you please comment on where Microsoft has delivered and Solaris has not?
Re: RISC Chips
Did you read the same article I did? Compared to the "new" IBM offering, the T5's seem to be light years ahead.
Sun was a religious zealot when it came to CMT. Threads at all costs!!! For web hosting and a lot of other workloads it worked great. However, in many other cases it did not work so well. It was like having to push start a race car because the gearing is for top end high speeds, but at the low speeds it couldn't even get off the starting line without a push. There were still too many of those stop light to stop light applications out there. Run super fast and then stop... That's what IBM did well at... Leave no app behind!
Since Oracle makes the applications, they seem to get what these servers are made for. You gotta do it all, and the T4/T5 seem to be perfect for that. Comparing a T4/T5 to what IBM is putting out right now is a joke. Cost to Cost and RU to RU, there's no comparison. The T4 evened the playing field and the T5 seems to jump over POWER 7+ easily. It will be very interesting to see if M4 can compete in the high end of the market that IBM now owns.
re: Destroy All Monsters
I completely agree. That's kinda Oracles point though. They optimize the stack so you don't have to. There's also some special sauce in there, but the beauty is in the simplicity and consistency. Of course, if it were just better integration then HP and IBM could actually be competitive with Exadata. So far, from the testimonials (read customers), Exadata is blowing everyone away on real customer data. You'd think that IBM would come up with a competitive engineered system if it were just integration of components. It's an engineered system right? IBM has engineers I assume?
@kain preacher
Though I disagree with the original posters premise that the employees killed the company, I can't help but feel that the Unions may have had a part in its undoing. The Unions force companies to overpay someone to do a job that obviously any third world person can do. Unions are anti-capitalist by nature. Capitalism requires that companies cannot band together and charge unreasonable prices. Unions are allowed to join forces and force companies to pay unreasonable prices for labor. You are not due a high wage simply because you show up to work. You should have to compete for what you get and if you're not worth it, then someone else will get it.
Re: Besides Larry Page and Jonathan Schwartz
El Reg did comment on Larry Page's and Scott McNeally's testimony in an earlier article. If you believe that Scott McNeally lied, you may want to read the blog post by James Gosling, Java's creator and all around Oracle hater:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57423754-94/java-creator-james-gosling-google-totally-slimed-sun/
re: Are Google that cunning
Does it really matter whether Google makes money from Android directly, indirectly, or at all? Oracle/Sun had a technology. Google liked it, used it and gave it away. If Google had paid a license fee, then perhaps they could not have given it away for free. It was Googles choice to take a loss, not Oracles.
scoop so low
You may not stoop so low, which is fine, but to say that $777M is a major part of Oracles business plan is dishonest. The three letter company you speak of, from Santa Cruz if I'm not mistaken, did in fact get to the point where they were only making lawsuits, not product.
You can make an argument that Oracle is dishonest, low down, thieving, or whatever your chosen epithet, but you cannot say that their business plan relies on litigation to a great degree. Last year they had revenues of $35.9 Billion, of which $777M would only be about 2%. Not insubstantial, but definitely not a major part either.
I thought is was...
April 1st. Nope. Not an April fools joke then.
Posted in Oracle forges Xeon E5 racks and blades
Re: Que? Down-voters.
I downvoted you because your comments are based on bigotry.
"The two are contradictory - if Larry really had just been biding his time then his website would have been ready to switch the new webpages into place along with the rest of the marketting."
Not necessarily. Vendors often announce product and then don't turn on the spigot until later.
IBM, for example announced POWER VII well before is was available, or before it was documented on their website.
Oracle has constantly stated that they are not a commodity player. They want to release an integrated, polished product. They don't want to sell things one at a time. This seems very consistent with that policy.
"To me, it looks more like Larry was actually desperately trying to look like Oracle wasn't a month behind hp, IBM and Dell."
At least you acknowledge that this is just your opinion, unlike some others here that espouse opinion as fact and even make "I've heard..." statements to spread FUD. I'm not sure that I see much desperation here. HP, IBM, and DELL seem to have no problem selling systems one at a time. Oracle seems not so inclined.
Of course, all of the above is just my opinion...
Posted in Oracle systems group slammed again in Q3
Re: "Ramp-up" or selling
EMC (Kevins employer) purchased Greenplum at the end of 2010. From that point on Kevins blog entries have been a bit less... um, pragmatic. Listening to Kevin Klossen about anything Oracle is like listening to Microsoft say anything about Apple.
Kevin has turned into a troll, unfortunately.
Re: Performance increase is not goal of a replacement....
geez Allison, are your pants on fire, or are you sitting in a pool of water when you write this stuff?
"Power7 is a chip that can be 4,6 or 8 cores depending on the performance customers want" -- This is merely a way to sell the procs with broken cores. It is not a feature. You'd think that since IBM owns the fab they could do a better job.
"Power7 has the ability to run 1,2 or 4 threads per core on the fly depending" -- Very misleading. IBM shops must change the thread count based upon the load, and the system does not adjust to the load in a dynamic way (Like SPARC T4 does). This means you cannot have a mixed workload in one instance.
"thread swapping in supporting 8 "simultaneous" threads down from 16 which did not work well." -- Did not work well? It works for the applications it's intended for. That's like saying that a single 4-Core Power7 does not work well, when you use it for a high throughput application. Just plain silly. As far as the "simultaneous" threads argument. Oracle has 16 threads running simultaneously on T3 and 8 Running Simultaneously on T4. The "switching" you speak of is to handle cache misses on each core (which believe it or not, even IBM has a lot of!) I think even Kebabart could explain this to you if you are confused.
"Oracle has a roadmap with M-class systems which are really T-class and Sun engineers have not been able to build a >4 socket system since 2004." -- Um, the roadmaps we've all seen clearly show the M-Series going to a different chip than the T-Series, and to at least 16 sockets. You merely spout FUD, but cannot substantiate any of it.
I do understand a little why Oracle not reselling SPARC64 confuses you, as you come from IBM, where rewrites/recompiles of code between different versions of SW/HW is common, but Oracle/Sun have kept binary compatibility for decades. They've promised to do this moving forward as well.
"I am willing to bet their M system will have the same terrible interconnect as the X4800." -- I'll that that bet! The X4800 is X86. M-Series is SPARC. X4800 only goes up to 8-Sockets, while the M-Series, shown on the roadmap, shows at least 16-sockets.
"Oracle is not only glueless they are clueless." -- You've been told before, but glueless is actually a good thing in many respects, especially in serviceability, and had relatively little affect on performance. Of course, since IBM does not have an entereprise OS they can put on their comparable systems, they/you would see glueless as a bad thing (Linux does not have the RAS features to take advantage of the serviceability benefits).
"I would say Larry would get out of hardware all together but he is a stubborn little man." -- I haven't met Larry, so I'm not sure of his stature. I agree, however, that he is stubborn. He will not give up easily on high-end HW, like HP apparently is (now that's FUD!)
I'm really impressed with the rate of innovation in SPARC since Oracle took over. IBM should be very concerned. I don't think they will be able to keep up in the medium to long run at this rate of change. Of course, Oracle has kept all of their SPARC promises so far, but it will be interesting to see if they can keep them moving forward.
Posted in NetApp reveals Exadata backup plan
Re: I smell something funny
I smell something funny too. It's your logic and obvious sour grapes.
IDC says that Exadata has sold over 1,000 Exadata's (as of about Oct '11). This matches the number that Oracle provides as well. I guess the average customer could have 10 of these things, but I doubt it. Oracle says that they expect to have sold about 3,000 by 2013. Not a bad market to get into.
One question that I have on the NetApp solution is can it do HCC? The Oracle backup solution with ZFS Appliance supports HCC so you do not have to decompress and then backup -- maybe it's not as much of a downfall as I think though. Also, can you hook up the NetApp storage directly to the infiniband network? Without this, then you would have to backup over the 1GbE or 10GbE network using RMAN, right? That does not seem like a comparable solution to the ZFS Storage solution that Oracle sells.
OK... I just looked a bit closer at the NetApp whitepaper, and it seems that you have to uncompress the data before backing up, and all of the compression benefit they show is only with non-hcc compressed data. I guess that answers that question.
There's also no mention of Infiniband, so I assume you can't hook up the NetApp storage to the Infiniband network either.
re: Jonathan White
I assume it was released because of the "freedom of information act". It is not uncommon for information like this to be released after the death of the individual.
Over regulation stifles
No poll can tell how many small businesses were not created simply because of over-regulation and outrageous "fees". If you're in business already, regulation can actually protect you from new competition as it makes it nearly impossible to break into an existing market.
So... TPM is honest with his biases, huh?
Oracle increases revenues by 2% and net revenues grow by 17%, so TPM's headline is "Oracle hammered as hardware sales soften: Software sales flaccid, as well".
IBM increased revenues by 1.6% and net revenues grow by 4.4%, and TPM's headline is "Currency flux capacitates IBM's Q4 sales: Earnings better than expected".
Is it possible to be more obviously biased? Really, you should just go work for IBM and be done with it. It would be funny if... well, I guess it is pretty funny.
Wunderbar1
I thought that Allison would beat out Matt for the most self-righteous commentard of the year award, but Wunderbar1 has come on strong toward the end. At least, to my knowledge, Allison and Matt don't have discussions with themselves... Wunderbar1 likes to congratulate himself on his cleverness through AC cover. Downright silly if you ask me.
re: old news
Hmmm. Lots of bitter jealousy from the IBM bigots. The quote was 30 machines, not just 2 as you attempt to imply. Oracle never claimed to sell many of the HP based systems, so my assumption is that the 30 systems sold were Sun/Oracle based.
I can't answer the question about the number of Exa's sold vs installed vs shipped, but the number that can't be fudged is the revenue number for Exadata and they've said they intend to triple that number this year (2012).
The continued FUD coming from the IBM crowd is hilarious. Exadata is doing extremely well and Oracle is making money hand over fist on it. As stated earlier, ask any customer how much free stuff Oracle has ever given them. I'm pretty sure you'll hear crickets.
Oracles revenue miss was because they did not grow as fast as expected. They still grew faster than IBM's last quarter where IBM grew just 13% versus the compare (well below analysts expectations). Oracle grew 17% with much higher margins than IBM.
re: Another Clarification
You make your statements as if they are facts. They sound like sour grape FUD to me. Ask any Oracle customer how much free they have ever gotten from Oracle. I'm sure you'll get a very hearty laugh.
Oracle won't even put a free unit on site for you to try out and maybe buy. They will however let you buy a unit and then try it out. Does any other vendor really do "Buy and Try" like Oracle?
This is the type of information that Allison would drool over, with the lack of
critical thinking that is.
"T3 was 6 months late"? T3 was earlier than most analysts thought it would
be. IBM says that P7+ will be out any day now... at least Oracle had an excuse
after having just acquired Sun. T4 was WAY early and they expect T5 to be
much earlier than expected as well.
"Very short chassis lifetime"?-- Just hyperbole. No one knows except Oracle.
IBM may give you one or two generations of slot compatible, but that's about
it. The M series was released in 2007, so according to IBM it will survive 'til at
least 2012 with at least 4 generations and speed bumps.
IBM questions the use of the term M4 and M5? Why not? Fujitsu never used
those terms for their chips... It's like telling IBM to not call their chip P8
because it will use a different chassis than P7. Nonsense. SPARC is SPARC,
no matter who makes it.
IBM complains about TSMC making the chips for Oracle? Huh? I thought
that one of the benefits of IBM making Power was that they make chips for
other platforms as well (games consoles, etc). TSMC has been making the
chips for T-Series and from what I understand SPARC64 as well. So the
problem here is?
IBM then says that the merger of M-Series with T-Series is the first
"new combined, dynamic threading model?" Huh? "Power5 had
this for 10 years"? Please correct me if I am wrong here, but I could
have swore that IBM's "dynamic threading" model was that if you
wanted full performance you had to turn off threading and possibly
even cores (you had to choose single thread perf or throughput).
T4 it is truly dynamic right now, not in the future, changing behavior
depending on the needs of the code. If you have a process that
needs a full core, then it will get it. If you need more threads, then
you will get those. No turning off cores or threads. When will Power
catch up?
This IBM FUD piece is laughable.
I forgot why I should care?
You're right, You shouldn't care. So, why are you commenting if you don't care again?
I don't know about in SF... SF has been pretty aggressive in shutting down any large gatherings of late. If you want to see "large" gatherings of the unemployed then go to San Jose or Oakland.
A quick look and it seems that the T4 beats both Power/Itanium/X64 on TPC-H on a per-core basis (IBM's favorite measure), and by 2-6 times on a per socket basis . I'm sure they're working on a SPECjbb benchmark. Can't do them all at once!
Posted in Oracle previews RHEL-ish 2 Linux kernel
If every major OS can include DTrace, and only one can't, which OS has the incompatible license?
I do agree, however, that DTrace would have to preside in the Kernel, so I am not sure how they (Oracle) would be able to distribute DTrace on Linux without GPLing it.
re: larry smelling the smoke?
Larry already has an In Memory DB, it's called TImesTen. It was originally developed at HP in 1996, spun off, and then bought by Oracle in 2005. SAP may be making more noise about In Memory DB, but they definitely are not the leader.
Posted in Oracle revs up Sparc, speeds up roadmap
re: Steven Jones
You must not have read the article. It clearly shows that the T4 is faster than the SPARC64 now. Also, the M-Series is an Oracle term. Fujitsu does not use it. So when oracle talks about having a T-Series and a M-Series merge into a common SPARC platform, that tells me that Oracle will be designing the next M-Series processor, not Fujitsu.
Posted in Oracle revs up Sparc, speeds up roadmap
Larry never said he wanted to get out of the x86 market, he said he wanted out of the low-end market where they have no value add. That means Exadata/Exalogic will still be around. I'm sure he would love to have SPARC replace x86 here, but SPARC will never have the volume to replace x86 cheaply enough.
As far as the next M-Series Proc, I would be willing to bet that it will not be a SPARC64 variant. Fujitsu has not mentioned anything about it, and Oracle has screamed about running everything on Oracle tech. Perhaps Fujitsu will be a reseller of Oracles M-Series tech moving forward? Any bets here?
Posted in US tops the class in IT competitiveness
re: The United States may be messed up in a lot of ways
Wow, a little autophobia anyone? The world is in disarray right now, the US not the worst of it. Let's just let the US have one good thing said about it without throwing in the hate.
It's like saying "I'm not racist, but..." Everything after it is colored by the first part.
There's no reason to be apologetic about saying something nice about the US. It may not be in vogue to say so, but the US actually has some good things about it. The same could be said about the UK, Germany, and dare I say it... France.
Posted in Amazon intros $199 movie Kindle
Too funny. I too live across the pond, and over here "fuck-off" means to go away -- by the quickest means possible. fuck-off == big. LOL
Posted in Oracle's UK server bellyache continues
re:re:re: "Epic"
Regarding the regulatory hurdles, I assumed you had read the article and would get the reference. Oracle is having difficulty actually onboarding their Sun subsidiaries in many euro countries... Because of said countries labor rules. As a result they are still run as separate entities from Oracle. I'm not sure how much this really affects sales, but it can't help. In other geographies they seem to be doing much better.
Glad to clear up your confusion Matt, but you really should read the article before commenting.
Bill
Posted in Oracle's UK server bellyache continues
Re: "EPIC"
LOL Matt. Funny to see you jumping on the first good news article that HP has seen for some time, but ignoring all of the reports of HP's spastic board and other problems.
If you read the article Dell was not down, but they did not rise very high either. HP had a decent increase in sales, especially with all of the bad news for Itanic and it's imminent demise. IBM is continuing to eat everyone's lunch, but I can't argue with you that it seems likely that Fujitsu's mainframe drop was helpful in this regard. As far as Oracle's Sun Servers... it makes sense to me. Europe has notoriously difficult regulatory hurdles. Outside of sales offices, I cannot figure out why any multinational would put any of their eggs in the EU. Sales in the US are doing relatively well, considering the highend shift. High End sales for Oracle actually increased (read SPARC), which is surprising considering that T4 was just announced and many customers are probably waiting for that -- even though that seems more of a midrange solution.
Posted in Rumor: HP giving Apotheker Das Boot
re: Isn't that German for "The boat"?
seems appropriate considering the sinking Itanic.
HP is no Sun, it's actually making money, but HP is rattled.
When Sun was making their purchases and trying to convert to SW, they were also still making money. I see the exact thing happening to HP. A software only CEO taking over a HW company.
Buying software companies for exorbitant multiples. The only thing missing is an "Investment Firm" to buy up a large sum of stock and start imposing their will on the BOD.
300,000 employees down to 100,000, if not even less. It's really too bad. HP was a very respectable company.
Where is MB to explain to us all how this will work out for HP?
Apotheker prescribes transformation elixir for HP
Yeah! Fire the board of directors... oh, wait.
Posted in NetApp misses revenue goal
re: It never ceases to amaze me
A companies current market value is equal to it's intrinsic value as well as it's future value. The market makes an estimate, based on company statements, of the future value. If for some reason that future value comes into question, then the market reacts. This is not rocket science (have you met the average financial guy?) Generally, like normal human reaction, the markets overreact. In the long run, however, the value will come to an equilibrium. That is why most honest advisers recommend a long view and eschew day trading.
re: I was going to say that they're a handy way of spotting dickheads,
Obviously you are one of those city types that must rely on others to get anything done beyond driving your Le Car to work and back. Leave the city, and your city services, long enough to realize that trucks are necessary for many reasons beyond getting from one place to another.
Just because your city sucks does not mean that my country living has to be affected by your same rules and inadequacies.
