Oracle stares into Sun for storage future

What about Oracle's HP storage business?

It was only in September last year that Larry and Mark Hurd from HP did a song and dance at Oracle's annual shindig in San Francisco to introduce the new Oracle/HP exadata storage system (http://www.oracle.com/database/exadata.html).

In fact at one point when Ann Livermore in person took to the stage, it was not clear whether it was an Oracle presentation or an HP one.

(...and (AFAIK) all oracle on demand is provisioned off NetApp)

At the same shindig in SF, Sun had generic PCs with Sun servers and EMC storage arrays - showing how joined up the story is in that camp.

So, confused messages from both Sun and Oracle on Storage. Personally I wouldn't invest in general purpose storage (or servers) from Sun now - even more so now the waters have been muddied by Oracle.

So what bits will Oracle sell off? SPARC to Fujitsu? OEL back to RedHat? Storage to Dell (who're reliance on EMC's products and have no credible hardware/software ecosystem of their own)?

@Steven Jones

As things are right now they are attempting to become another IBM, with better products than IBM though...

Oracle will have no interest in putting ZFS into Linux. They will have a differentiating killer feature, they don't want it to share it with their competition(for free). I What I actually expect to happen is stopping contributions to projects like BTRFS and SystemTAP. As things are right now they will own the original thing ZFS and DTrace, will not make sense anymore to subsidize Linux development.

Oracle is a profitable company, it has no problem shutting off unprofitable projects even if they are their own.

Alternatively.....

Working for an SI and delivering complex IT systems, I know that you can't do everything on WinTel, well you can, but there can be very expensive drawbacks.

I also have heard that all is not well in the massively distributed systems and cloud computing department. High security environments are a nightmare for a start, as you never know what information is where, and what might have been left lying around, provably.

I suspect that Oracle will remain in the hardware business, and that the new Rock and T Series servers will appear under the "Sun an Oracle Company" label. How many properly engineered T series web, or application servers would you need in a company if the software is optimised for them, which shouldn't be that difficult for Oracle. Definitely look for low cost T Series appliances, and High End, high availability, very secure database servers, marry Trusted Solaris to Oracle Label Security at a much lower level and a lot of government agencies will be salivating at the mouth.

Not everything in IT revolves around commercial organisations, and there are lots of very valuable defence and security, and remember where Larry comes from and who his friends are, including Scott.

@Matt Brynat

You don't need to spend your cash, hard-earned or not, to acquire the rights to the Niagara. The design is open sourced. Of course you still have that little issue of designing the server it fits in, paying for the fabrication, future developments and so on.

off-topic (by a smidgin)

That photo of Larry (on main Reg page, accompanying the link) - did you photoshop the hairdo (to look like a Roman Emperor), or is he really that much of a knob?

@The only way the Oracle-Sun merger makes sense

Solaris is the most popular Oracle Unix platform.

Sun go bust / get bought by IBM - all those sites are suddenly shopping for new kit.

Do you think the IBM HW salesman on the doorstep might have been offering some inducements to switch to DB2?

'Round and 'Round I.T Goes

Vertical integration is dead. At least that's what we used to say. As an old fart in this dusty corner of the world, I have seen the model shift from one-vendor-for-everything--hardware, services, software (OS and applications), think I.B.M in the 70s and 80s--to stick-to-your-knitting, chose best of breed: OS from company A, hardware from company B, applications from C-L, services from company M. Here we go again.

Oracle, it appears is no longer satisfied to be a huge software shop making healthy margins on licensing (short of running the mint, I know of nothing that comes closer to printing money than licensing).

Virtualization has revived the big box mainframe model. The new vertical integration, just like the old, will prize product differentiation over interoperability. Will Java be forked, with some features proprietary to Oracle and others remaining freely available? Will ZFS be proprietary?

A vertically integrated company can assure themselves acceptable margins on products that have up to now been under price pressure from outside vendors in one of two ways: Will it be innovation and economies of scale, or proprietary designs and walled gardens?

Early days. Oracle is accustomed to higher margins than many (any?) hardware companies. I wouldn't bet the house on openness. If R&D is slashed, that does not bode well for innovation. In the near term, bet on layoffs.

@New Name

Unlike the festering pile of maundering donkey flop that is HP, Oracle actually value the brand name built up over many years.

Just look at Peoplesoft. One of the big boys taken over by Oracle but still a household name.

My money is on Sun retaining the name for servers.