Posts by Matt Bryant

RE: Typhoon vs Rafale

"......the Rafale is a real usable multirole fighter when Typhoon is useless." Really? So. what extraodinary level of logic did you use to get to that conclusion? Let's compare - Rafale has blown up Libyan tanks, so has Typhoon; Rafale has flown counter-air without engaging any Libyan jets yet, and same for Typhoon. So it looks about even, which implies (using your "logic") either Rafale is just as junk as Typhoon, or you are just a gromless Fwench troll with the weakest of non-arguments. Please go back to the Teletubbies forums until you have grown up enough to participate in adult conversation.

RE: All that money

".....an abandoned unserviceable tank....." Oh dear, old Lewis's converts don't even need assistance pulling the wool over their own eyes, they're happy to do it themselves! Leona needs a reality check. Because, of course, Lewis was able to use his superhuman, intercontinental-range x-ray vision to look inside the tank, confirm it was empty, and also his intimate knowledge of Soviet tank technology (they teach a lot of that on RN minesweepers? Really!?!) to be able to deduce it was an "unserviceable" tank. Of course, the rest of us, just looking at the MoD's video, would only be able to tell that the Typhie found some Libyan tanks at night and successfully smacked them without itself getting smacked, which is not an easy task. For all Lewis knows, they could have been manned and with weapons hot and just waiting the order to move out and attack the rebels the minute those pesky RAF fighters had gone (the Libyan's probably read Lewis's bumph and thought "oh, it's a Typhoon, what me worry"......).

So, once again another useless load of bilge from Lewis, full of exaggeration and bile, and pushing the F/A-18? Puh-lease, whilst the F/A-18 is a good jet, compared to Typhoon it is a dodo in air-to-air, and no better in ground attack either. The real problem around the Typhoon project has always been the meddling politicians, the aircraft is far better than Lewis wants to believe.

RE: re: The IBM blades chassis needs another redesign.

Well, it would be nice to have some options, but at the moment the Integrity blades just walk all over the IBM Power blades. Seeing as we've really bought into the blades idea for x64 (the only non-blade IBM or hp x64 we buy now are the 8-socket rack servers), it is easy to slide hp Integrity blades into an existing chassis. The IBM rack servers are much more competitive, so why can't IBM sort out their chassis so it can handle the power and cooling required for some real Power blades? Our Snoreacle rep may be running the FUD mill at warp 10 when he says IBM have given up on Power in blades (really ironic given Sun's dire history in blades!), but a lot of our smaller UNIX requirements just go straight to Integrity because the Power blades are weak.

RE: "Itanic is actually the right choice."

Well, you seem to be thinking with the Western corporate mindset - who can I sell my end product to in the general marketplace? - when this announcement seems to be wrapped up in a lot of Chinese ego. The Chinese government are (alledgedly) chucking wads of both cash and kudos to Chinese companies that develop solutions that are "free" of Western control. Seeing as one area the Chinese government is very sensitive over is complete control and monitoring of any form of electronic communication inside and crossing China's borders, I'd say there is plenty of financial motivation for a large-scale SMP platform for the Chinese telecoms market. And it will probably run some form of Linux (lots of info on IA64 Linux already out there for the Chinese to use), with custom-written Chinese apps (as in Western apps like MySQL rewritten by Chinese coders). Given that Itanium is a very powerful platform for Linux development, suddenly it makes more sense. Red Hat only dropped development on Itanium because us customers preferred hp-ux, but if the Chinese want full code control then hp-ux is not going to be their choice. Afterwards, I'm sure the Chinese government will be only too happy to sell the solution to other (Third World) countries, probably with plenty of backdoors built in.

RE: Samurai Larry will not be pleased

Just wait - tomorrow, Hurd will be announcing that Oracle is stopping development of all Oracle products for RHEL.....

RE: re: as dead as the Itanium

Actually, I don't agree with asdf as I think this box will actually sell quite well - compared to the CMT offerings, that is. See, it's the only real option for all those Slowaris holdouts that haven't ported off SPARC yet. And it is getting the speed bump for the very same reason the M3000 was brought to market in the first place - CMT just doesn't work with the typical, single-thread-heavy applications the Slowaris base are using. Snoreacle are having to load the faster SPARC64s into it in an attempt to stop the migrations off all those old UltraSPANKed servers. Can't help laughing at the idea of consolidating two v440s onto one though, seeing as we can already do better (and cheaper) with Slowaris on Xeon, let alone the even better option of Linux! Larry is just praying there will still be some Slowaris base left by the time he gets a CMT chip out that can manage better single-threaded performance than an ARM core. Now, Slowaris on SMP ARM, that would be a better bet!

Also worrying to see Larry is fitting features into the Oracle software products to only work with Slowaris. I can't think of a better way to switch us customers off the products than to try and force SPARC on them.

/SP&L

RE: Lame commitment

This should be fun!

"1) "Strong" commitment to Itanium...." And.... What, you're not denying it's a strong commitment? So, how does IBM make a "strong" commitment to Pee8? Seering as there is NO public commitment to Pee8 at all, no public statement from IBM at all, by Allison's own measure, Pee8 is vapourware and never going to arrive. People in glass houses....

"......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...." IBMers always get frantic when someone mentions targetting their precious mainframe racket (remember PSI?). Strange that Allison assumes all IBM mainframes run nothing but Oracle software - not the last time I checked! Looks like Allison needs to do some homework on her own kit whilst she swots up on other vendors' offerings!

"......3) 14,000 applications..is that counting the HP-UX software that needs the Aries emulator?...." Nope, that's pure Itanium-ready software, as she well knows (hence the question mark so she can IMPLY the point). By the way, Alli, how many apps are there out there for Pee7, as in recompiled for Pee7, not old Power apps that don't run to their full potential on Pee7 without a full recompile and probably a rewrite? A few hundred at most, maybe a thousand?

".....4) Tukwila more than doubled the performance of its predecessor (considering it has twice the cores its a lame statement)...." Strange - Pee7 doubles the cores over Pee6 but didn't double the performance, as admitted by IBM's own presales team......

"......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?...." And the public roadmap showing a Pee8 CPU at 22nm is.... Oh, there isn't one! I'll try and look surprised that Intel have a more detailed and believable public roadmap than any of their competitiors.

".....6) "We are currently starting exploratory work for what comes after Kittson" (would this be an emulator on x86?)...." Seeing as IBM haven't made any public "strong" commitment to Pee8, maybe you should hope there is a Power emulator in next gen Xeon.

"...... 7) continue to migrate....to industry standard solutions running on Intel Itanium...(talk about a stretch on the term industry standard)...." Anyone can buy an Itanium CPU from Intel, make their own or buy a mobo for it, and make their own servers. The fact is that hp are simply far better at it than the rest of the industry. Including IBM, who did try very hard to compete with their own IBM Itanium servers (yes, we tried the x450 for MS SQL on Itanium and went hp Integrity instead, and that was about as level a playing field as IBM could hope for).

".......Beam me up Kirk" Sorry, Alli, but given the shabby quality and inaccuracies in your posts, you'd probably not meet Star Fleet standards! News of The World, maybe.....

RE: @ Matt Bryant

"....I just tried upgrading a newish Dell desktop for a friend...." I'm guessing he was desperate then?

"....I had to get written permission from Michael Dell just so I could remove a side panel...." I'm also guessing "newish" means still under warranty, which means you were lucky to get permission to do anything to it. All vendors have warranties, and they'll all tell you that if you're not one of their service partners then upgrades will invalidate the warranty. Get over the Dell hatred.

RE: Trouble for....

I think you've spotted the real plan - remove customer control of their data by forcing them in the next gen of Apple devices to keep the media/data on the Apple cloud. Then Apple has complete control over what you get to play/download/install as you have to stream it, and anything they don't like will be deleted from your library regardless of where or how legally you got it. This is standard Jobs micro-control, and they'll dress it up as offering their customers the ability to have all their media on all their different (Apple) devices, and the Apple fanbois will let themselves be tied in knots and still scream about how great it is.

RE: Right and wrong

Oh boy, it's Duncan Sandys' love child! Every time you get someone saying "this or that tech makes that old tech obsolete" you have to point out there are very few truly grounbreaking developments that totally eliminate a previous class of weapon. As an example, before the tank, trenches, the machine-gun and artillery dominated the WW1 battlefield. The tank changed the balance and allowed the infantry to come forward and take the ground, but no-one stopped using machine-guns, no-one stopped using artillery, and even modern soldiers spend plenty of time digging foxholes.

".....all demonstrated that infantry armed with modern weapons beat ground armour...." No. For example, during the initial assault of the 1973 war, the Egyptian infantry used Sagger AT missiles and scored many kills against Israel's tanks operating without infantry support. The juh-nah-lists of the day immediately wrote off the tank as a spent force, just as Sandys had insisted we didn't need manned aircraft due to the ability of "robot planes" (missiles). The Israellis had a think, rebalanced their forces to mix armour and infantry again, and trounced the Egyptians.

"...... and aircraft up to 15000 feet...." More of the "killer-SAM" faith? As far back as the run up to the 1973 war that was shown to be a fallacy. The Egyptians put their faith in Soviet SAMs, and they did shoot down a lot of IAF jets, but the Israellis found tactics and technology (jammers) to redress the balance. And MANPADS may shoot vertically 15,000 feet, but then that's the very unlikely ideal where the target is obligingly right in the correct spot. More likely is it's a crossing target, or going away, which reduces the launch envelope down to a few thousand feet at best. A jet like the Torando can be through that smalelr envelope in literally seconds, which doesn't give your MANPADS-toting footslogger much of a chance to get a missile off (or even arm his system if he's not pre-warned). That means you'd have to have a MANPADS-armed soldier, with some form of early warning, spread out about a mile apart over your entire front, just to protect that front line, let alone your rear areas. And the majority of even the most modern MANPADS can be duped with '60's tech - chaff and flares. Back in 2003, the Iraqis had plenty of MANPADS, SAMs, early warning systems and C3 for co-ordianation, and the Coallition had no problem destroying it all.

So, you still need tanks to help infantry take and hold ground (which is the only way to resolve a war), and you still need aircraft both to kill the other guy's tanks and to stop his aircraft doing the same to yours.

RE: useful Tornados, for sure

"Now, I may be totally off on this one, but wasn't the original intent of the Tornado program to be more of a fighter/interceptor....." Correct, you are completely off on that one.. The PANAVIA Tornado program was a multi-national program between the UK, Germany and Italy, to develop a common, long-range, multi-role bomber to replace the mix of '60s and '70s jets they all had. The Fwench tried to mess it up as it looked like killing their Mirage sales, but were edged out of the project. What resulted was probably the best interdiction aircraft of the day, far superior to the F-4 Phantom II, F-16 and even the F-15 Strike Eagle. The Tornado is still one of the fastest aircraft in the World at low level, reputedly fast enough to give even the F-22 a serious interception problem.

The UK also had a requirement for a long-range interceptor for Atlantic patrols, mainly to defend against Soviet long-range patrol bombers. The role was being filled by RAF Lightning F6s and Phantom IIs but neither of these fighters was ideal. The eventual requirements list included very low fuel useage, endurance, and combat persistance by carrying as many medium-range AAMs as possible. The only off-the-shelf aircraft that came close was the F-14 Tomcat, and even that couldn't hit all the requirements. But by lengthening the Tornado (which allowed more fuel to be carried) and developing it into the ADV model BAe met all the criertia. Early ones did have a problem in that their radar wasn't ready (look up "Blue Circle Airline" for a laugh), but the later F3 is still an excellent long-range interceptor, and very effective for UN "no-fly" zone operations. For example, in the operations in the former Yugoslavia, the Torando was much more successful at catching the Serbian MiL choppers that the Serbs operated at night and on the deck in an attempt to get round the NATO air blockade, more so than any other fighter fielded by NATO in the theatre.

Indeed, the Tornado ADV was so good at the interceptor role that the Italians, whom originally only intended taking the bomber version, decided to lease RAF Tornado F3s whilst they waited for Eurofighters.

RE: All went wrong at the end there, didn't it?

Have to agree, the idea of buying Red Hat seems a bit far fetched, especially as the market valuation of RH is rediculously high. Given Leo's background, I'd say he's much more likely to get cuddly or even acquisitive with SAP, which would give hp Sybase to fight back with and also mean they could cut Oracle out of the SAP supported stack. Now that would make Larry howl! I suppose it depends on how much Larry's "support license" blackmail fee is

I also don't see how lack of Oracle for Windows on Itanium was a problem as every Windows on Itanium jaunt I heard of used M$ SQL. All we did with it was round M$ SQL consolidation, which must have hurt M$ licensing-wise as we would consolidate literally hundreds of individual Xeon SQL servers onto a quite small Itanium cluster.

RE: HP to buy Sybase ASE and IQ from SAP

Hmmmm, maybe. But didn't SAP buy Sybase also as an Oracle defence mechanism? Would they sell one of the key bits they would need to make a total SAP software stack, knowign that would give them few options should Larry decide to go after the SAP customers?

RE: "the choice that immediately jumps to the fore has to be Power"

Whilst flattering, I have to question your motives, darling!

The point here is the Power option is also a loser for Larry, and seeing as I really don't think I'm smarter than Larry, you have to assume he will have seen that too. So, the question is does he plan the same for Power, or does he have a sneakier plan such as forcing hp to support Slowaris on Itanium. He needs a better option than SPARC64, which is coming to the end of its development, and CMT just doesn't do the job. Slowaris on Power? A hard port. Slowaris on Itanium? Was planned and developed long ago, when Sun was originally behind Itanium, and the Itanium is a great platform for porting. Given the natural hatred of the idea in hp, how else can he force hp to support Slowaris other than blackmail?

RE: Didn't I suggest that in another post

"I'm pretty sure I suggested HP buy SAP/Sybase....." At the time it was unlikley given hp's commitments to M$ and Oracle. With Larry having turned on them, hp are no longer so constrained in the enterprise arena (but they probably still don't want to upset M$). I can see a very close relationship forming with Oracle's DB competitors, but I'm still not sure hp will go and make an outright buy. So, no contradiction, just changing circumstances.

"....You also ridiculed DB2 plenty...." My personal pref is Oracle over DB2, simple as that. I know some DBAs that prefer DB2 to Oracle, I suppose it's a matter of taste and experience. Yes, DB2 is probably the best direct swap out for Oracle, but I'd be worried about how much IBM Global Scewups would have to be included in any migration. Maybe hp will start some "get-off-Oracle" migration services in retaliation.

RE: Happy Friday Matt.....

You still don't give a reason for hp to port hp-ux to x64. After all, Oracle is not the only software vendor, but they are beginning to look like the leader in the "no-choice" lock-in vendor arena. Even M$ gives you more options!

As I said before, why would hp port hp-ux to x64 when Itanium is still alive and selling well? Yes, the app is king, but Oracle DB is not the app, it's just part of the app stack, and a supporting part at that. Just look at SAP - I can run a SAP instance on hp-ux on Itanium using Ingres, DB2, PostgreSQL or Sybase. I'm sure there are many other options that we haven't looked at up to now as we were previuously happy with the hp-Oracle relationship, but now we'll have to consider more options. For our bizz critical requirements we like to keep two verndor options for each and every part of the solution stack - two server vendors (currently hp and IBM), two OS (hp-ux and AIX), two DBs (Oracle and DB2), only the top of the stack (the business role application such as SAP) is common.

I suggest you give up the bitterness and just try and get on with life. Sun is dead and gone, OK?

/SP&L

RE: Finally, Itanium is high priced junk.

"....It's an X86-64 world.....There is no longer any reason at all to support IA-64...." Go read up on "scale up" and "scale out", have a think, then come back and post something with a thought behind it. Big UNIX boxes scale very well, without the enourmous effort of rolling your own x64 grid solution. And, seeing as Snoreacle are a third-tier x64 vendor (and hp are the number one), that M$ SQL is the leading x64 database, faster growing and taking share from Oracle on x64, I'm pretty sure Larry wasn't thinking about the x64 market.

RE: not only but also

You forgot to mention that Mark Hurd likes to offer ex-soft-pr0n actress hostesses..... Alledgedly, etc, etc, obviously because they are such competent marketing specialists....

/Where's my "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" icon?

RE: MS and RedHat did it

Kebby, you didn't do the maths, and you a maths grad too! Even if Larry had the perfect overlay of all 35,000 Sun customers all being Oracle buyers too, that would still mean 265,000 Oracle customers already told him they did not want SPARC!

RE: Dead man walking

We did start a pool here as to which database company we think hp might buy (MariaDB got a lot of votes!), but I'm not so sure they will now. After all, buying a database company would upset M$, and the ProLiant-Windoze juggernaut doesn't need that. And then there's hp's history of working with as many software options as possible so as to offer the most options as possible, which is why hp is also the leading Linux server vendor. No, my guess is that - if this doesn't turn out to be another attempt to extort more licensing costs like Larry did with Slowaris on ProLiant - that hp will simply double up efforts on offering migration services to get off Oracle.

/off to dig out my "PostgreSQL for Dummies".....

RE: Now's the time to convert from Oracle to Informix!

<Sigh> Yeah, I know, but the IBM Software salesgrunts are much keener to push DB2.

RE: haha

Dear Sunshiner,

Chances Larry will sell more SPARC off the back of this? Zero! Chances hp will buy SAP and a database company, and continue to be the leading server vendor by a massive margin? Pretty damn certain!

/SP&L

RE: Itanium is not the same as Power

At the enterprise end of the market, there are really only five choices for database platforms - hp-ux (or OpenVMS) on Integrity (maybe NonStop for real do-or-die solutions); AIX on Power; IBM mainframe (strongest damn zombies I've ever seen!); Slowaris on M-series SPARC64; or roll-your-own grid-type mega-clusters on x64. If I was told I had to use Oracle and the Itanium choice is taken away, then the choice that immediately jumps to the fore has to be Power, with SPARC as a very poor alternative. Simply put, IBM have a good product now with a believable roadmap, and it offers the alternatives of DB2 should the Oracle insistance drop with time. Snoreacle have a poor product that lags the competition, poor secondary offerings (for example, a competitive and complete storage offering is still another of Oracle's problem), a roadmap that looks like someone was snorting Charlie at the time of creation, Sun's record of dramatic failure to deliver which limits enthusiasm, and looks to be a lock-in to Oracle and restricted choice. Ellison and Hurd just became IBM's top salesmen!

RedHat and M$ dropped support for Itanium because us customers paid the extra to have hp-ux instead, not because hp couldnt sell Integrity. The smartest thing Larry could do right now would be to port Slowaris to Itanium and cut a deal with hp to sell it for him. Maybe that's what this is all about.

RE: Perhaps... he went to far this time our old frind larry

I'm dusting off the report on the last POC we did with DB2. Just been asked to run through it again. Damn you, Larry, I was looking forward to a quiet Summer!

RE: SP&L or whatever....

I'm guesing the whole "split-brain" thing included a large amount of memory loss? For those with a short memory, go back and look at Larry's flip-flops over RedHat - first he loved them, then he hated them, then they partnered with them, then they did an attack campaign on them, etc, etc. It's almost a shame that hp-ux doesn't have a monkey as a mascot like Tux the Linux penguin, as I think Larry would look just right in a monkey suit for when he is forced to flip back behind hp-ux!

RE: Kiralexi - Wrong way round..

".....Oracle will simply price their hardware lower than (the admittedly better) P-Series to keep us on SPARC....." Yeah, and that strategy worked so well for Sun! Oops! - no it didn't, even trying to flog their kit 20% lower than IBM or hp still didn't save Sun. Walking around with their pants round their ankles just made Sun fall over all the faster.

Take my company as a case study, we're the enterprise type of bizz Larry will want to sell SPARC to, and we run a lot of Oracle on Integrity and Power. Consider the options:

1. Stay on hp-ux on Itanium and find another DB (we don't really use much else from Oracle), but then we'd have to revalidate the app stack. Painful, messy, and risky to data, but we do have DB2 tested and ready to go. I'm grinding my teeth at that idea, but it's bearable, the main risk is in getting the data out of Oracle and into DB2. A loser for Oracle.

2. Stay with Oracle DB, just move to another server platform. Not as painful as we already have IBM Power scoped as a backup choice, but no win for Oracle there then unless they also bump up license costs on Power, and they just make the board twitchy about trusting Oracle.

3. Larry's preferred option - replace all the hp-ux kit with Slowaris on SPARC. Not even on the table, for so many reasons, but mainly because Power is such a better option.

4. Switch to x64 where we can. Very painful, more so than the switch to Power. Larry still wouldn't win anything here, in fact he would probably lose more as going to x64 leads to all kinds of unfavourable comparisons with M$ SQL and/or FOSS alternatives. The x64 option gives far more choices for moving away from Oracle, not towards them.

All in all, this strategy seems to benefit IBM more than Oracle. Larry's not stupid, at least not THAT stupid, so I'm guessing there must be more going on here.

RE: Support is very costly

Dunnie, your argument doesn't hold water. For a start, the majority of the task is the initial code base for UNIX, which should be pretty common for AIX, SPARC-Slowaris and hp-ux. The real work is done later when the code is optimised for each platform, and I'm told a lot of that is done by hp for the hp-ux versions. It probably costs a massive amount more to try and make the base code for CMT, which is very different to classic EPIC/RISC CPU code. If it was merely an economic argument then Larry would have stopped development on CMT and sold what little was left of the Sun hardware carcass to Fudgeitso. Maybe this is an attempt to make hp buy the Sun hardware bizz, like Oracle wanted hp to do in the first place, or maybe Larry is trying to force hp into supporting Slowaris on Itanium. I'm told by the hp and IBM reps that they had a big target for the year - all the customers still on SPARC-Slowaris - but it looks like Larry has just given the IBM and hp sales teams a new set of opportunities - all those accounts using Oracle that can be sold DB2 or M$ SQL instead!