We have 1000 on order
Can't wait to start getting them in.
oh that's right I am just kidding...would be cool to get a few if we had the right workload and money
Posts by Allison Park
281 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jan 2010
IBM 'Blue Waters' super node washes ashore in August
VMware taxes your virtual memory
Wednesday 13th July 2011 08:28 GMT 
IBM POWERVM
We like VMware for consolidating/compressing old x86 boxes, but our mission critical workload is on IBM Power systems. It looks like the latest VMware version will allow each VM to scale to two chips, not sure why VMware still does not scale to 8 sockets for each virtual machine. Unfortunately, we have Oracle software and they require us to replicate all failures on bare metal without vmware before they will touch our problems.
I think HP needs to buy emc with vmware to become relevant again in the IT space.
Cisco may slash 10,000 jobs
Oracle Solaris 11 to abandon elderly servers
Thursday 30th June 2011 13:10 GMT
Yet another reason to hate Oracle
We won't be doing Solaris 11...and unless an app only runs on Solaris we don't allow anyone to buy a sparc box. The purchasing department has strict orders to halt all sparc orders in the company.
I wish we could do the same for any Oracle product...but we are locked in.
Oracle to triple Exadata installs this year
Saturday 25th June 2011 08:59 GMT
How is your English?
"but don't to act like your an actual IT person."
"A cluster is not just a partial of a rack, it could be multiple racks. "
Wow...did you start drinking early on Friday? What Oracle said is they have "installed" over 1000 Exadata servers. They made it clear it is not 1000 clusters. What would be even more damning is if they count the exadata storage servers and database servers as separate installs then you can take that install number of about 100 customers and cut it down to about 50. I am sure Larry is being very "creative" about counting his "success". Insane how he highlights his salesforce.com sale when he ridiculed them at oracle world for having a horrible infrastructure without security and protection. I guess he can push his stock ownership of salesforce.com to push the truth.
My point is the numbers are still very small and they are still playing ketchup to Netezza and Teradata. As much as Oracle wants to relish in the cheap price they paid for Sun they still do not have a viable hardware strategy/offering.
PS...We do not have any BI appliances as we prefer to host our BI on the production servers and use virtualilzation to contain the BI queries vs. production.
fyathyrio
Friday 24th June 2011 18:33 GMT
Look into the Oracle...and finally some truth from the big liar
We took the the Exadata champion in our organization off our promotion list for being stupid. The business case was insane with soft benefits of "integrated", "easy", and more Oracle marketing grap. We already have a highly efficient Oracle on Power installation and moving our virtualized environment to cloud with automation of the virtualization. $12M per rack is insanity which just causes further lock-in to the evil Oracle.
Ellison said in the Wall Street call today that Oracle has installed over 1,000 Exadata clusters (not racks, but distinct clusters) so far, and that it can triple the base to more than 3,000 machines in fiscal 2012.
So what does this mean. Well i hear that most customers bought 2-4 of those 2 socket boxes since you need at least two to use the RAC licenses you have to buy.
Let's just guess 4. That means they have 250 racks in the market. Most customers have to buy two or three racks. One for Production and one for Test/Dev. Banks have to buy three since they also need DR.
So when you look at what Oracle has really done in the last 2.5 years is "install" about 100 Exadata's. When you remove all the pilots/demo centers/partner centers/ISV free boxes...etc..
you still have less than 100 customers.
cheers...
HP dubs Oracle 'bitter antagonist' in Itanic spat
Saturday 18th June 2011 12:13 GMT
Oracle is evil and HP is a wimp
Reminds me of the old cartoon about a big muscular guy kicking sand at the wimpy kid on the beach. The wimpy kid comes back after weight lifting and kicks the big kids butt. Since HP is just a tin seller and I don't know of any meaningful middleware companies left to acquire I don't see HP ever getting the upper hand.
The most interesting line is how HP complains about how Oracle raised the price to be equal to Power7. "There is no technical or business reason to raise the price". Maybe that is because HP knows Power chips have cores which are 2.5X faster than Itanium cores.
HP/Oracle alliance agreement....I saw nothing in the lawsuit that shows a binding contract to support Itanium.
Can't wait to see the blacked out information about Mark Turd.
Seeing that almost everyone has dropped out of the Itanium $10B alliance will be very interesting to hear about the truth of the Itanium marketing.
Cheers.
Time to say goodbye to Risc / Itanium Unix?
Sunday 12th June 2011 01:06 GMT 
Unix is on the rise in our shop
IBM continues to grow and be the torch bearer for Unix. Power7 is unmatched in the industry.
Yes our x86 boxes are doing more than before but there are still serious issues with reliability...we see it being about 5 year mean time between failure which is about 100 failures per year...yes we have 500 x86 servers.
scalability....we cannot put big workloads on it because each virtual machine can only scale to half of a nehalem chip. V5 will get scalabiltiy to 2 chips but we wont have that certified in production till next year. I/O is also a major bottleneck
performance.....good perforrmance but we dont buy anything past 4 sockets. Its funny everyone says how x86 has such big revenue and box counts but that is because its cheap and we have to buy so many of them. I would rather buy a box that is twice as expensive but only have to buy 1/10th of them
sparc and itanium are dead to us and off the approved platform list.
x86(intel) and power are the standards.
Its is ridiculous that people call Unix proprietary when you look at our "open x86" you find we have standardized on intel/hp/VMware/RedHat/Oracle its not only proprietary but a mess to support.
cheers
Resellers and customers frustrated by botched Oracle deliveries
Server biz bouncing back to boom times
Friday 27th May 2011 08:28 GMT
Numbers don't lie
1Q is a down quarter for most vendors, especially IBM who has a fiscal year matched to the calendar year, but has some very good insights into the industry. We need Unix systems and they provide a unique value proposition in reliability, virtualization technology and scalability.
Unix is growing again as "Unix collective enjoyed a 20.7 per cent revenue pop, up to $2.6bn"
IBM is the clear leader with $1.19bn. (higher with Hitachi and Groupe Bull AIX boxes)
"HP ranked number two at $639.3m."
Oracle is #3 with $610.8m, but you could claim it is $737 with Fujitsu also running Oracle Solaris.
What I find interesting is Oracle is dropping Itanium support because it is being phased out by Intel after Kittson, but won't admit that there is no 45nm, 32nm or 22nm SPARC64 chip...its at EOL two generations before Itanium.
Cheers.....Matt B. and Shish Kabbob
Server sales grow thanks to big boy boxes
Wednesday 25th May 2011 08:45 GMT
Unix and mainframe growth....their demise was greatly exaggerated
IBM is hitting on all cylinders and HP is doing well on x86.
I am floored that Oracle was able to grow the SPARC business as the Oracle reps only want to talk about Exacrap. The next IDC report will show the HP Unix crowd in complete shock from the Oracle announce. HP's latest earnings announce foreshadowed the forthcoming numbers.
What I am waiting for is when IDC will finally publish unit numbers for Exadata. The Oracle reps have the DBA's here all excited about "taking back their IT and this new multi-billion dollar business Oracle had created" and as much as we show them the facts they want bring in yet another unsupported platform which will cost 4X the cost of aquisition in support costs. I am looking for real IDC numbers to show how much Oracle is lying to the end users.
I heard that while Poulson is "targeted for 2012 the actual systems wont show up till 2013"...and Fujitsu is about to announce a speed bump to the SPARC chip....but its still the same chip.....Oracle and Fujitsu are really good at making big announcements without content.
HP exec: WebOS tablet will trounce iPad
Tuesday 24th May 2011 04:52 GMT
viewsonic gtablet
can be had for under $300 and is easily rooted as there is a whole community to support it
xda-developers.com the nook is nice if you just want to read books and mags
if you want a great tablet get the gtablet....and put on the amazon marketplace to get a free app every day. The kids love them and are the perfect back seat entertainment centers.
HP's Q2 beats targets, but Q3 and Q4 look tight
Friday 20th May 2011 08:34 GMT
Still waiting for a strategy
The last time Leo spoke we saw a strategy to develop a strategy.
Now we see a company without a vision or a strategy. This reminds me of when Lou Gertsner took over IBM and said the last thing they need is a vision. But what he meant was he needed to remake the whole company...and he did. So what is Leo doing? Oracle has cut them off in the enterprise space. Their palm strategy dooms them to be left out of the tablet market. Printers and ink are facing increases competition as people realize HP charges more for black in than the cost of human blood.
We have written off HP. IBM is our preferred partner and Oracle is the partner we have to use. Oracle reminds me of CA from years ago. Maybe Larry will meet the same fate as the CA CEO.
cheers.... Allison
Porn found in Osama bin Laden compound
IBM preps Power7+ server chip rev
Friday 6th May 2011 09:28 GMT
Matt is getting testy
Maybe because everyone is shocked to hear that the 32 socket box is still not shipping. When I was at Oracle world I stopped over at the HP booth to compare technology as I always do. I was told last October the 32 socket was on the web shipping and the 64 socket is an easy extension with two more cables.
Apparently its a "32 Socket Starter Package" which is a little deceptive if you ask me.
Even the brochures say its there with a little disclaimer *3 32 Socket Starter Package; upgrades to 32 socket server in future release
HP would be wise to be low key about the release because they will alert everyone that they are about 8+ months late.
Obviously there will not be a 64 socket expansion as the brochure would have had 64.
So what HP is limping around with is a 16 socket box that has the same number of cores as IBM's 8 socket box with each core only being about 40% of Power7 core (compare the 1TB results at tpc.org). So today's full SD2 is about 3 sockets in a 4 socket p750.
HP forges 32-socket Itanium iron
Tuesday 3rd May 2011 08:48 GMT
Let's compare
February 2010 IBM announces Power7 at events worldwide the largest in NYC while Intel announces with HP in the audience at a trade show in San Fran.
IBM started selling Power7 systems in March 2010. The p770 and p750 I believe 8 socket and 4 socket.
IBM started selling the Power blades in April. HP started selling Tukwila systems at the end of April. The 2-8 socket blades shipping immediately and superdome2 was announced.
Sept. IBM starts selling the 32 socket p795 which is a board upgrade from the p6 595. HP starts selling the 16 socket Superdome2 which is a forklift upgrade.
Keep in mind that the 16 socket SD2 only has half the cores/socket and less performance per core. So in reality HP started shipping the equivalent of an IBM 3.4 socket box.
16 sockets/only half the cores/2.35 the ibm advantage by core as shown by tpc-h.
So HP might bring out the 32 socket box soon which according to HP documents is just a couple of cables but its is not comparison to what Power7 is doing.
It's no wonder why Oracle is dumping Itanium as they performance test on both platforms. As far as increasing the per core license factor well that was just cruel. Glad we started moving off HP so it wont be cruel to us.
cheers
Monday 2nd May 2011 16:29 GMT
HP and Intel continue to divest
This is why we moved our standard from HP to IBM Power. HP still only has a 16 socket box which has half the cores of Power7 and each core is less than half the performance of Power7 cores.
TPC-H is a direct comparison which shows Power is 2.35X better performance per core.
So did we want to but an extremely expensive systems from HP with 16 sockets, or would we rather buy a great price performance Power7 four socket box and get more performance and a fraction of the 3rd party software costs? We did end up putting the p770 as the preferred database consolidation server to increase utilization of our expensive middleware.
bootnote.....HP does not use the 5 QPI links for the SX3000 chipset. The architecture drawings show that one QPI goes to I/O, and one QPI each go to the dual SX3000 chips. Two QPI links are dead. So you have a disjointed architecture. The BL890 needs either 8 QPI links per chip or the SX3000 and the SD2 only uses 3 out of 5.
IBM juices Power7 chips for midrange workhorse server
Friday 15th April 2011 13:44 GMT
HP four wide walks all over power?
No Matt,
We looked at the HP four wide Itanium blades with 8 chips and found the two wide Power7 blade with two chips had more performance. The Power7 cores have about 2.3X the performance of Tukwila cores (just look a the TPC-H benchmark one of one two benchmarks HP has released...where is SAP 2tier!) and having twice the cores per chip.
The dual socket 16 cores blades and four socket 32 cores blades are perfect for our HPC work and since we have an ELA for websphere the denser footprint is attractive.
Oh and don't forget the Itanium four wide 8 socket offering does not have the SX3000 chipset so the 5 QPI links on Tukwila does not scale past 5 sockets directly. Woops...come on HP and Intel get your act together.
Oh and don't forget the Stuperdoom2 which has the SX3000 chipset only uses 3 of the 5 QPI links. Does Intel and HP actually collaborate on the chip?
Matt..please stop peeing in public....you are such a punter
Intel on Itanium: 'It's all about the OS'
Thursday 14th April 2011 09:10 GMT 
2016 - HP gooses Ivy Bridge server virt with Itanium emulation
HP gooses Ivy Bridge server virt with Itanium emulation
Hewlett-Packard is getting serious about getting customers to move off those vintage HP Itanium boxes, based on its final generation of Intel Itanium processors, and onto shiny new x86-based Integrity2 blade servers.
With the launch of HP-UX 11i v4 today, HP's flagship operating system will be able to run compiled Itanium applications inside of partitions equipped with an emulator.
That emulator, called Aries2 and technically a dynamic binary translation layer that converts Itanium calls to x86 calls, has been around since the early days of the Itanium chip, which was co-developed by HP and Intel. The Itanium was intended to storm the world, knocking out all other processors (including the x86, Sparc, Power, and MIPS). But thanks to Intel's ineptitude with Itanium, Advanced Micro Devices' genius (and perhaps luck) in getting the Opteron x64 processors out exactly when Intel was weakest in 2003, and Intel's cloning of the Opterons with its Core-based Xeon servers, the Itanium has now been officially sent to the boneyard with PA-RISC chip. HP customers still around running HP-UX applications, with a smattering of OpenVMS, Windows, Linux and NonStop clusters can keep the faith that they can delay that eventual migration yet another year or two.
Hi Matt :-)
Oracle, Fujitsu goose Sparc M3000 entry box
Wednesday 13th April 2011 08:07 GMT
Long in the tooth...and also dead
"Sparc64-VII+ is looking a little long in the tooth, particularly with its DDR2 main memory. It is time for the M4 chip or whatever it will be called, but Oracle and Fujitsu are not expected to get the next Sparc64 chip out the door until 2012."
But we all know the T4 which is a CMT chip is the replacement for SPARC64 as there will be no more SPARC64 chips. So let's all admit it and move on. It really annoyed me that Oracle said Itanium is dead but wont admit to the facts behind their own (well maybe Fujitsu's) roadmap. Then went to great lengths to say they have renewed the relationship but devoid of any technology direction.
Now as far as the CMT chips, can Oracle make a decent T4 chip to compete with Westmere EX and Power7/7+ only time will tell.
People have their doubts because Oracle cannot undue in 2 years what Sun did for the prior 5, people have their doubts about every other architecture out there also.
If nothing else Oracle has made this market interesting to watch albeit painful to participate.
....and Matt B...and please no more peeing in public
Intel set to reveal Itanium's fate?
Tuesday 12th April 2011 18:51 GMT
resorting to derogatory now?
I am shocked Matt.
1) I hear Power8 is baked but IBM does not want to give details because it has a lot more than just the typical cores/cache/threads/execution units as other chips are doing. I don't see a lot of info about Kittson either which I hear is just a fab enhancement of Poulson.
4) Power7 has 4X the cores of Power6 and also increased core performance for a 5X per footprint increase compared to Tukwila's 2X (as stated by Intel and many HP executives)
5) I hear Power8 will be 22nm just like Kittson but should show up in 2013 if IBM keeps on their 3 year cycle.
6) No one in the industry doubts IBM commitment to Power
7) Itanium is what it is and I think will be killed by Intel just like it killed PA-RISC, MIPS, Alpha
In a restrospect it is a successful chip, but really only successful in what it has done for x86
Matt, this is not about HP. It's about how Lew Platt and Rick Belluzzo decided to trust Intel with the future of HP's enterprise systems and HP and us the customers have had to pay for the poor decision. HP wanted to get out of the chip business but found themselves still in it because they had to make the glue chips (SX2000, SX3000) for the Itanium to get it to scale past 4 sockets.
It's been a disaster and the latest spat with Oracle is the final nail in the coffin. Our HP rep before he left said that they were told to have every customer write a letter to Oracle. How is that going?
I think you missed the Kirk joke....and it is Allison...not Alli
Monday 11th April 2011 01:48 GMT
Lame commitment
Here is the letter
http://www.hwsw.hu/kepek/hirek/2011/03/Intel_Itanium_Commitment_Mar_2011.pdf
"Highlights"
1) "Strong" commitment to Itanium
2) Targeted to $15B RISC/Mainframe market...well with only HP-UX, VMS, Non-Stop and without any Oracle product it's a pretty week arrow going after that target
3) 14,000 applications..is that counting the HP-UX software that needs the Aries emulator?
4) Tukwila more than doubled the performance of its predecessor (considering it has twice the cores its a lame statement)
5) Poulson will be delivered on Intel's newest 32nm technology (won't this be old technology by the time 2012 rolls around when everyone else is on 22nm?
6) "We are currently starting exploratory work for what comes after Kittson" (would this be an emulator on x86?)
7) continue to migrate....to industry standard solutions running on Intel Itanium...(talk about a stretch on the term industry standard)
Beam me up Kirk
HP and Violin build Oracle Exadata killer
Thursday 7th April 2011 23:03 GMT
Exadata X2-8
What a piece of junk. Oracle admitted that they need scale up nodes in Exadata so they introduced an 8 socket box in addition to their 2 socket. This just shows how f'd up Oracle is when it comes to hardware. Nehalem EX was made for a 4 socket configuration. Each chip has 4 QPI links so it can use one to talk to I/O and the other 3 to talk to the other 3 chips in a four socket box.
Can you put a Nehalem EX in an 8 socket configuration? Yes but the performance is horrible. In order for chip 1 to talk to chip 8 it must use chip 3 as the communication path. Unfortunately, for Oracle Sun never invested in a "glue chip" to scale beyond the 4 socket Nehalem.
HP has "Cross-Network Connectors" XNC's to connect the chips in an 8 socket box and IBM has x5 chips.
I wonder if Larry has gotten past 100 Exadata's sold yet. He keeps talking about $2 BILLION of pipeline but when will an analyst get the ____ to get a solid ship number. Gartner? IDC? where are your facts.
I hear Sun SPARC is Dead on Arrival anyways.
The curious incident of Oracle and HP-UX on Itanium
Monday 28th March 2011 08:24 GMT
Dare you to be bold about predictions
Dan,
Hope all is well.
I know you have to be cautious with vendors as they pay for you research, but
Mark knew Poulson is a significant investment for Oracle to use the double wide.
Mark knews Kittson is nothing more than a simple die shrink
Mark knows there is nothing after Kittson as Intel has no interest in spending good talent on such a low ROI product.
So Oracle has come out and said make it public that Itanium is dead and there is no reason to spend $100M to support Poulson if the product is on a death bed already.
Now the announcement this early and the day before HP's annual shareholder meeting is pure evil, but after all everyone knows Oracle has "Customer's over a barrel" why not treat their new competitor and Hurd ex-employer the same way.
Obviously the relationship with IBM is different thanks to DB2 but also the growth, investment and future of Power technology. Not only does IBM have big plans for future Power chips, but it is a big ROI platform.
SPARC64 is in the same boat with Itanium as Fujitsu has cancelled all future chips, funny that Oracle does not want to admit that. Hello where are you on calling out Oracle about the death of the SPARC64 chip and try9ing to pretend the "M-class" system on the Oracle roadmap is not a T-chip.
Power now becomes the anti-monopoly platform to Intel as AMD has disappeared from the enterprise space and Oracle dropped all AMD support.
HP will buy Sybase ASE and IQ from SAP in a vain attempt to solve this crisis but will find it just makes it worse, just like Sun found out by buying MySQL
HP will announce this before the end of April.
P.S. I where to I apply to be an Oracle tradeshow girl?
Ellison drops iceberg in front of HP's unsinkable Itanic
Sunday 27th March 2011 16:11 GMT
Don't forget Mark Turd is co-president
Mark knows Poulson is a significant investment for Oracle to use the double wide.
Mark knows Kittson is nothing more than a simple die shrink
Mark knows there is nothing after Kittson as Intel has no interest in spending good talent on such a low ROI product.
So Oracle has come out and said make it public that Itanium is dead and there is no reason to spend $100M to support Poulson if the product is on a death bed already.
Now the announcement this early and the day before HP's annual shareholder meeting is pure evil, but after all everyone knows Oracle has "Customer's over a barrel" why not treat their new competitor and Hurd ex-employer the same way.
Obviously the relationship with IBM is different thanks to DB2 but also the growth, investment and future of Power technology.
SPARC64 is in the same boat though as Fujitsu has cancelled all future chips, funny that Oracle does not want to admit that. Hello TPM, Dan Olds where are you on calling out Oracle about the death of the SPARC64 chip and try9ing to pretend the "M-class" system on the Oracle roadmap is not a T-chip.
Power now becomes the anti-monopoly platform to Intel as AMD has disappeared from the enterprise space and Oracle dropped all AMD support.
HP will buy Sybase ASE and IQ from SAP in a vain attempt to solve this crisis but will find it just makes it worse, just like Sun found out by buying MySQL
Saturday 26th March 2011 20:12 GMT
HP to buy Sybase ASE and IQ from SAP
HP will buy the database and BI software part of Sybase from SAP. SAP bought Sybase for the mobile computing software not the database assets. Given todays market appreciation SAP should be able to sell the DB piece for the same price they paid for all of Sybase.
Expect this to be announced before HP's fiscal quarter end. April 31st.
Sybase shares a common code base with SQLServer so it will be more complimentary than threatening to the M$ft relationship.
41089
Wednesday 23rd March 2011 16:43 GMT
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
Oracle to HP: 'Liar, liar, pants on fire'
Friday 25th March 2011 06:32 GMT
Mark Hurd was well aware of the end of Itanium and now Oracle knows
This is not about vanity or revenge.
This is about HP firing the person who knows the true future of Itanium and that person is now the president of Oracle.
Oracle has no plans to support the next chip which will have ZERO per core performance increase and does not have a future. There is no reason to support Poulson when Kittson is nothing more than a minor speed bump.
I hear HP is not even going to have a follow on to the SX3000 chipset so all the QPI speed increases for Poulson wont even show up in the Superdome2.
Unfortunately HP customers pay for Mark Hurds R&D cuts...and now have to pay for Mark Hurds Oracle software cuts because of his HP hardware cuts.
This also shows you that Oracle has no intention of doing the same to IBM's Power chip as it is growing, has a long future and is the real only alternative to Nehalem....well unless the T chip can survive long enough to run databasts
Intel and HP defend honor of Itanium
Thursday 24th March 2011 12:34 GMT
Intel's careful words
Don't confuse Intel's commitment to HP-UX with its commitment to to Intainium...obviously they are trying to get HP to port HP-UX to Xeon or do an Aries emulator again.
"We remain firmly committed to delivering a competitive, multi-generational roadmap for HP-UX and other operating system customers that run the Itanium architecture."
Allison
HP revs NonStop blades with Tukwila Itaniums
Wednesday 23rd March 2011 13:11 GMT
Oracle puts last nail in coffin of Itanium
"After multiple conversations with Intel senior management, Oracle has decided to discontinue all software development on the Intel Itanium microprocessor," Oracle said in a statement late Tuesday. "Intel management made it clear that their strategic focus is on their x86 microprocessor and that Itanium was nearing the end of its life," the company added. "
We will miss you Matt B.
What is Mark Hurd working on?
HP lays cuckoo egg in Microsoft nest
Thursday 10th March 2011 10:29 GMT
Another Sun in the making?
I've seen this movie. A dead end highend technology (Itanic/Sparc) but HP is at Intel's mercy
A lack of software except for operating system (HPUX/Solaris) but HP is worse
People leaving in droves because of low morale. (HP dropped the "invent" from its logo)
Yet another storage acquisition which replaces the DEC storage (3PAR)
Piissing off every partner (Oracle/Microsoft/Cisco/RedHat....)
They need to buy PostgreSQL and completely make Oracle hate them just like Schwartz did with MySQL. I really liked the NeoView technology they should bring it back. Old BI technology on Tandem OS on Itanium and you wonder why no one bought it.
It should be an interesting year as we wait for more software acquisitions like Palm.
If it wasn't for the great money maker of black ink HP would be on the list with Unisys and SGI.
IBM rides 'third supercycle of growth'
Intel sends 'Poulson' Itaniums to the shrink
Oracle and Fujitsu hook up on Sparc servers
Tuesday 15th February 2011 16:52 GMT
I agree
Hi have to agree with Matt on this one.
HP has a long history of IT technology innovations. The explosion of printer revenue came from IBM's spin-off of printers and creation of Lexmark. But today HP has transformed into a balanced company with services and hardware. We still use HP for x86 and were HP before the compaq acquisition. We have looked at moving but never justified the change.
There have been stumbles along the way. 1) forced migration from pa-risc to Itanic 2) CEO's getting fired
If they get a software business they will prosper but right now all I see is partnering with Ballmer and pissing off Larry.
As far as the sunshiners......face it scott screwed it up, jonny pissed on it and all that is left is Oracle's mean spirited extortion of Sun customers. The basturds came in last month and found some failover serves which were "not licensed correctly" and tried to get us to buy Exadata so we would not get charged retroactively. We called their bluff
Cheers
IBM euthanizes Power6 and Power6+ systems
Tuesday 8th February 2011 17:09 GMT
We moved all purchases to power7 last summer
In comparing performance and price of power7 to power6 we found it worthwhile to move all new purchases to power7. Power7 has 5X the performance per footprint than power6 and ibm dropped the price/performance in half. We used to be late adopters but the price performance of power7 is incredible. I am guessing everyone else came to the same conclusion and power6 sales dried up quickly in lieu of power7. We actually went out and bought some 780's for our database servers and moved the p6 database machines down to the app tier. Called it our "cascading technology" project.
Cheers
Memo to Microsoft, RIM, Nokia: Quit copying Apple!
Oracle slashes software prices on own iron
Tuesday 7th December 2010 15:49 GMT
Wrong
Matt....good to see you are alive.
Oracle just doubled the cost of all of their software on Itanium systems. This is big news for any HP customer who still buys Itanium.
The new cores don't have more oomph than the old cores. The chip has 2X the performance but that is because it has twice the cores. The big reason they don't have more oomph is because the EPIC architecture requires large amounts of cache. Montvale 24MB cache / 2 cores = 12MB/core Tukwila 24MB cache / 4 cores = 6MB/core
Ask HP for their Performance Query Reporting Tool (PQRT) report and it will show the per core performance has not improved from Montvale to Tukwila. I believe a companies own capacity planning tool, not some blinded technology drone.
Wall Street Journal Dec. 3, 2010:
Ellison Says Oracle Will 'Go After' H-P
"We think the H-P machines are vulnerable. We think they're slow," Mr. Ellison said.
And we will make their systems prohibitively expensive with our software pricing. HP is a parasite to Oracle.
"Seeing as the core count on the new Tukzilla Itaniums has doubled per socket compared to the older Montecito/Montvale dual-cores, Oracle is simply maintaining the status quo" This just does not make sense...the price per core and that is how Oracle prices software is 2X what it was in November.
HP didn't exactly half the price of HP-UX they just decided to price per socket and given the poor market share and declining business it is a marketing play.
I do agree that SPARC is very low performance and this helps address the discrepancy in pricing.
Cheers from the UK
Ellison: Sparc T4 due next year
Oracle erects mystery Sparc SuperCluster
Thursday 2nd December 2010 10:45 GMT
T3 does have a world record
The most cores required for any given workload of a current box.
Nehalem eats its lunch and it can't even do the workloads p7 does.
The Fujitsu session at Oracle world was a ZERO content joke. It was interesting that they used the Sun SPARC system manager to show the roadmap and avoided questions because someone might as if the future M-class systems are actually CMT processors.
Soooo glad we put a stop to new Sun hardware years ago.
Marvell fires first shot in ARM-x64 server scrap
Wednesday 10th November 2010 15:31 GMT
Power7 owns the Unix market
IBM sells Mainframes, Power and System X. Customers buy the right systems for the right workload and the price corresponds to the value. We don't use mainframe for our printer servers and we don't use x86 for our expensive software licenses. It's because of Larry's pricing we put all their software on Power.
Larry Ellison comes out fighting against HP Apotheker 'madness'
Apple COO Cook to take the HP helm?
Tuesday 28th September 2010 16:51 GMT
HP needs three leaders like they need a hole in the head
HP can't get anything done as it is let alone with three leaders. Oracle has one leader and a CFO and COO......Larry just calls them Presidents for Sh1ts and giggles.
Let's see that America's cup video again.......I for one will never return to OOW........it is a waste of time, money and insulting. In this time and age we don't need to travel up to SanFran to listen to vendor presentations that we can view on a webcast. The Black Eyed Peas were good, but you can't buy me that easy.
Allison
Oracle gooses Exadata clusters with chunky Intel chips
Tuesday 21st September 2010 19:55 GMT
Larry Ellison's top ten list for Oracle Open World success
1) Pretend Oracle has $1.5B of Exadata pipeline when the opportunity list is less than 75 customers worldwide and less than 100 ever sold (just ask IDC)
2) Compare only hardware price to the most expensive system IBM has to offer.
Ignore that the WebLogic suite on the new ExaLogic box will cost $8.1Million
3) Release benchmarks which noone else has done in years or make a new one so you can claim world wide leadership
4) Refuse to discount Exadata hardware so you can deliver on the $1.5B in profit promise
5) Release a 16 core T3 chip with terrible core performance so you can increase the software licenses required
6) Show off your America's cup at the entrance so everyone can see where their IT budget has been going
7) Bring in the Black eyed peas so all the attendees don' feel like they spend thousands to attend to see a bunch of hardware vendor powerpoints
8) Make sure no one raises their hand when HP's Anne LIvermore asks how many people in the audience use HP for their Oracle software
9) Have some wine before your Sunday hardware pitch so people see you sweat and be giddy about how everyone told you not to be technical
10) Tell Mark to give back the $30M when he got fired from HP
Ellison: 'We can double Oracle's hardware biz'
Friday 17th September 2010 13:27 GMT
Exadata V2 - Larry makes up pipeline numbers
$1.5B.....pretty soon every Oracle customer will have Exadata in their pipeline whether it is a real opportunity or not.
Look at the references they provided for Exadata, most of them are V1 references. Where's the beef Larry. (I don't want to know)
Next earnings call someone better ask..."This question is for Safra, (since Larry does not give straight answers) how many Exadata racks have you sold?" I bet it is under 100. The reason Softchoice was 50/50 software/hardware is because Oracle is giving ZERO percent discount on the hardware and drastically discounting the software to try to compete. Just look at the list price and you can see how deep they had to go on the software.
There will always be customers that will look past poor performance/reliability/TCO to have one throat to choke. Unfortunately, with Oracle's huge prices increases from last year and the software audits and hardware maintenance changes the throat that is being choked is the customer. We are finally looking at DB2 after all these years of being in denial.
Allison
Microsoft douses VMware with cold cloud shower
Tuesday 31st August 2010 23:57 GMT 
Dear Oracle customer
Before you sign that 3 year ELA or ULA you should talk to IBM about Power systems.
Power7 delivers incredible value for your software investment and can help you dramatically decrease your maintenance fee's with Oracle. Power's virtualization and performance is unmatched in the industry with 8 years of wide spread acceptance.
Ideally you should be working towards reducing your Oracle costs a year before the license renewal. We have reduced our core counts every year since we moved to Power from SPARC and keep getting more value out of the software licenses we bought years ago. Past waste of 10% utilized licenses has enabled us to not have to buy any new "capacity" licenses in years.
Works for us....we laughed at the Oracle rep when she tried to sell us Exadata with all new license required.
(Hi Matt B)
Allison
IBM completes Power7 server arsenal
Tuesday 17th August 2010 22:08 GMT
Very Cool and I like the green stripe
I have always been a fan of scale up systems which because of the higher utilization levels and I/O capability are actually the greenest of the bunch.
Blades are just a form factor reduction vs. the best answer.
Reminds me of the IBM commercial about someone stealing all the computers and the young dude saying we put them all into the box in the back of the room.
TTFN,
Allison
Biting the hand that feeds IT
