Floyd Teter on Exadata: Out of my league

Floyd Teter, a consultant with Oracle partner Innowave Technology, vice president of the Oracle Applications Users Group, and former systems engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had this to say about Exadata. Remember, Teter is an apps guy, and Exadata is a database box. Anyway:

But as an apps guy, it just doesn’t excite me much. And, looking from the perspective of a small or medium size business, the cost is probably way out of my league. Maybe it will get more traction with SMB as a deployed system for hosting cloud-based services, but that remains to be seen. So the resurrection of big iron isn’t really doing much for me personally.

James Gosling quips on JavaOne/OpenWorld

James Gosling, the founder of Java, roamed the halls at JavaOne and Oracle OpenWorld last week wearing a T-shirt that, he admitted, he saw no one else wearing. Anyway, he had a few amusing things to say. On Oracle hiring former HP CEO Mark Hurd, Gosling heard:

One of the formerly Sun, now Oracle, folks asked roughly “Larry hired Hurd, saying that fudging his expense report wasn’t grounds for dismissal; does that mean that all Oracle employees now have permission to fudge their expense reports?”.

And on Oracle salespeople:

One of the more entertaining lines I heard was at a cocktail party held by some 3rd party partners. “We love the Oracle sales force!” (what?? surprised look on my face) “They’re so nasty, their prices are so high, and their tactics so obnoxious that all we have to do is be credible and treat the customer with respect - then the deal is ours!”.

Should Oracle thank Micron instead of suing them?

DRAM from Micron

Oracle has sued memory manufacturer Micron Technology, Inc., a federal lawsuit that looks like a money grab for transgressions that happened 10 years ago.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday, aims to “recover damages caused by a long-standing conspiracy among manufacturers of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) computer chips.” In addition to Micron those conspirators, according to Oracle and based off a federal Department of Justice investigation, include Hynix Semiconductor, Infineon Technologies, Elpida Memory and Samsung. It is unclear why Oracle is only suing Micron right now.

In the lawsuit, Oracle refers to these companies as “the DRAM cartel.”

The DOJ found that the companies, which accounted for about three-quarters of DRAM manufacturing in 2000, engaged in price fixing to close off the market and overcharge customers. Oracle is claiming that between 1998 and 2002, Sun bought more than $2 billion worth of DRAM at inflated prices for use in its servers and workstations.

The DOJ investigation wrapped up in 2006 and led to billions in fines for the companies, and even imprisonment for some.

Now as for Oracle’s reason for bringing the lawsuit:

“Oracle, as successor in interest to Sun, has standing to bring this action, because Sun purchased DRAM from Micron and its co-conspirators during the Conspiracy Period. In doing so, Sun was injured by Micron’s and it’s co-conspirators’ unlawful actions, because it paid more for DRAM than it otherwise would have, as described more fully above. These higher prices caused Sun to lose money and customers, who could not afford to purchase Sun’s products containing artificially high-priced DRAM.”

Though Oracle might have a legal argument here, the logical idea of it seems far-fetched. When Oracle acquired Sun, it paid $7.4 billion, or $9.50 per share. Back in the early 2000s, Sun stock was going for north of $200 per share.

So now Oracle is suing Micron for causing Sun to lose money and customers, which eventually led to its stock being cheap enough so that Oracle could buy Sun. Right?

Shouldn’t Oracle be thanking Micron here?

Oracle, HP, Mark Hurd come to quick settlement

News came this week that Oracle and HP quickly settled their dispute over former HP CEO Mark Hurd being hired as co-president of Oracle.

The word is that HP wouldn’t have had much of a case in court, with some saying that HP’s partnership with Oracle is too valuable to HP to drag out a lawsuit. All of it helps to confirm Oracle’s potential status as the world’s scariest software company.

Hurd resigned from HP in August amid allegations of sexual harassment of an HP employee and discrepancies of up to $20,000 on Hurd’s expense reports. Upon the news, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison lashed out against the HP board for forcing the resignation of Hurd, who often plays tennis with Ellison. Shortly later, Ellison hired Hurd as co-president of Oracle, replacing Charles Phillips.

That’s called a one-two punch.

The next day, HP sued Oracle, saying Hurd violated his severance agreement. Ellison then said the lawsuit would put a strain on the partnership between HP and Oracle.

Now it’s three weeks later, and the two have settled. In a regulatory filing yesterday, HP said Hurd agreed to return almost 350,000 HP shares that was part of his severance, which also included about $12 million in cash.

People I’ve talked to here at Oracle OpenWorld said a strain on the partnership between HP and Oracle would put more of a strain on HP than it would Oracle. HP simply provides the hardware that Oracle Database runs on. Ask most IT people out there, and they’ll tell you that they are much willing to switch to a different hardware vendor than rip-and-replace their Oracle infrastructure.

If HP dragged on the lawsuit, would Oracle have positioned itself as even more of a competitor to HP than it already has? That’s likely. In Ellison’s eyes, HP just provides commodity hardware that Oracle Database runs on. It would be better for Oracle if its customers ran on Oracle/Sun hardware anyway, so they would have just ratcheted up the sales pitch even more.

End users’ reaction to all this hullabaloo? Most don’t really care.

Is the next version of Exadata on its way?

This summer, Oracle announced that sales of Oracle Exadata Version 2 would approach $1billion in 2011, though it took nearly a year after its release for Exadata V2 to gain interest among users.

So is now too soon to start thinking about Oracle Exadata Version 3?

We don’t even know if that’s what it will be called — Oracle has not made any official announcement - but blogger Kerry Osborne is speculating how the next version of Exadata will compare to V2. And, though much of the hype for next week’s Oracle OpenWorld conference has been around Fusion applications, Osborne says that he expects to see some Exadata V3 announcements at OpenWorld.

Exadata V2 was a drastic change from Oracle’s first version of Exadata, which hardly sold more than two dozen units. While the original Exadata was focused on data warehousing, V2 is focused on both its online transaction processing (OTLP) capabilities and data warehousing appliances.  Those who have reported success with V2 have seen great improvements in performance time and speed , especially as queries are distributed across both storage and compute nodes.

In its next version, Osborne thinks we’ll see more memory, more processing power and physically larger database servers that include the option of attaching external storage.  Osborne also speculates the following improvements:

• More flexibility in configurations
• Some analytic and aggregate functions offloaded to the storage layer
• A stand alone storage unit with a variable number of trays, or other software to perform some of the SAN features

What do you think? Do you use Exadata V2? What would you like to see in the next version?

Oracle upgrades Solaris with Sun Solaris 10 9/10

Amid all the news around former HP CEO Mark Hurd joining Oracle, the company upgraded Sun Solaris 10 this week. The updated version is called Oracle Sun Solaris 10 9/10.

This is similar to the regular quarterly upgrades Sun would release for Solaris, and though it doesn’t have anything groundbreaking, there are a few features worth noting, especially as they pertain to other Oracle products:

• Specific network enhancements for Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC)
• Increased reliability for virtualized Solaris instances when using Oracle VM on Sparc chips
• Tools to move earlier versions of Solaris on physical machines to Solaris Containers, Solaris’ virtualization technology in Solaris 10.
• Solaris ZFS tools for recovery and device management

You’ll notice that the top two are related to getting Solaris to run better with Oracle products. This all feeds into Oracle’s continued push of its stack IT architecture, which is its attempt to get end users to run everything Oracle, from the chip to the application. John Fowler, Oracle’s systems chief and formerly Sun’s systems chief, said as much in a video announcing the Solaris enhancements this week.

Most Solaris users won’t be overwhelmed by the new upgrade. One I wrote to replied that it seemed “like a lot of hooplah for a normal quarterly update revision.” He also wrote:

“Oracle seems to be trying REALLY HARD with the ‘LOOK WE CARE ABOUT SOLARIS! SEEE!’ thing.”

As you can see, some Sun Solaris users are still skeptical of Oracle’s motivations.

This upgrade, and any other quarterly upgrades in the next year or so, will serve largely as stopgaps until Oracle is ready to unveil Sun Solaris 11, which is due out next year as you can see in the roadmap picture here (click picture for larger version). Not to speculate on the geography of the words in the slide, but it looks like Solaris 11 will come in the second half of next year.

In the video, Fowler said Solaris 11 will go up “in scalability from single terabytes of memory to double-digit terabytes of memory” and “from hundreds of threads to thousands of threads.”

Analyst weighs in on former HP CEO Mark Hurd’s value to Oracle

Yesterday I asked Jonathan Eunice, the founder and principal IT advisor at Illuminata, about Oracle hiring former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd as co-president. Our story yesterday showed that end users seem mostly indifferent to the hiring. In particular, I asked Eunice how Hurd’s experience leading Teradata might help at Oracle, particularly when it comes to the Oracle Exadata machine. Here’s what Eunice had to say:

Teradata isn’t really a hardware company–at least not in the general-purpose hardware sense of HP, Dell, etc. It’s more an appliance company; like NetApp or Netezza; what you’re buying is the software intelligence about solving a particular problem, but the way it’s bought and sold is tied to specific (hardware) systems. Some call this “iron-wrapped software.”

Exadata is a great analogy; a relational DBMS plus the pre-configured hardware to run it–so the system can be highly optimized for the task at hand, but more important, so that the customer doesn’t have to bother with the nuts and bolts. Hurd has experience selling this kind of appliance-ized technology at Teradata, and HP ramped up similar thoughts during Hurd’s tenure, including its Neoview data warehousing play and BladeSystem Matrix.

While the “infrastructure by the pound” model is definitely on the rise, Oracle’s probably more interested in the fact that Hurd has now worked with a large number of premier global enterprises at two different vendors. He has a lot of contacts and friends among customers. He’s been talking to them for years about what they want in data processing and analytics, and he knows the competitive landscape well. He also was highly effective as an operational manager at HP, bringing it discipline and much-improved results. Finally, he knows exactly how Teradata (an Oracle enemy) and HP (a huge route-to-market for, and leading frenemy of, Oracle) work from the inside. So if you can get over the ’stepping out with a contractor’ and ‘diddling his expense claims’ issues, he can be a great asset for Oracle.

Oracle-Google lawsuit changes course of JavaOne conference

The upcoming JavaOne conference — part of Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco — looks to be shaping up quite differently than Oracle planned.

When James Gosling left Oracle back in April, he said he was “pretty encouraged about the way things would work out” for Java. But now the father of Java is leading a campaign to protest Oracle’s strategy for the open source programming language, including the software giant’s recent lawsuit against Google.

On Friday, Gosling revealed on his blog “free Java” t-shirts (and mugs and pins) that he designed himself and asked JavaOne and OpenWorld attendees to wear one to “let Larry know you care.” The shirts feature the slogan “Java - Just Free It. Hold Oracle to their Pledge,” referring to Oracle’s promise in 2007 to create an independent Java foundation.

Oracle’s lawsuit against Google last month claims that Google is violating Oracle’s intellectual property through its use of Java on its Android smartphone.  And though he claimed to be “pretty encouraged,” maybe Gosling actually had an inkling that something like this would happen when he left Oracle:

“During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle,” he wrote in an Aug. 12 blog post.

But Gosling isn’t the only one to stage a protest at JavaOne - Google is showing a major one of its own by pulling out of the conference altogether. Google was supposed to play a significant role in the JavaOne, with employees scheduled to present a variety of sessions on topics including Java in the cloud and GUI animation.  Google’s Joshua Bloch called his company’s absence at the show a “painful realization”:

“We wish that we could [present at the show], but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally,” he said.

Google has also called the lawsuit “baseless” - but is this completely true? And could something like Gosling’s t-shirts really prove this? JavaWorld blogger Josh Fruhlinger certainly doesn’t think so. He writes that “the idea that (the t-shirts will) somehow change Oracle’s trajectory strikes me as ludicrous,” adding that while an independent Java foundation once made sense for Oracle, it’s no longer in Oracle’s best interests (and Gosling and others may be having a hard time separating emotion from business).

Ellison and executive vice president Thomas Kurian plan to discuss the future of Java in the opening keynote at JavaOne. It should be interesting to see how many Gosling t-shirts we notice in the crowd- will you be wearing one?

Oracle continues telco push with new Sun Netra servers

Oracle introduced two new Sun Netra servers today, one a blade and the other rack-based.

Both servers are based on the latest Intel Xeon processor nicknamed Nehalem, and follow up on earlier Sparc-based Netra products that Oracle-Sun announced in May. Mark Butler, the director of product management for Netra Systems, said the new servers mean a doubling of the processing cores and threads compared to previous models.

Butler said end users can expect more Netra rack and blade servers from Oracle in the next year, but he gave no further details. The first server is the Sun Netra CP3270 ATCA blade, which includes quad-core Intel Xeon chips and up to 32GB of memory. The other is the Sun Netra x4270, which includes quad-core Xeon chips and up to 144GB of memory. Both are compliant with Network Equipment Building System (NEBS), which is the standard for telecommunications IT.

The telecommunications industry was always a big one for Sun Microsystems, along with financial companies and academia. Oracle is working to make the Netra line as close as it can architecturally to its enterprise line, presumably in an effort to streamline design and manufacturing costs. Butler said that Oracle is trying to minimize any differences between the Netra and enterprise lines.

Detailed Solaris and Sparc roadmaps extend through 2015

Oracle has released some long overdue roadmaps for the Sparc processor and the Solaris operating system, and they’re substantial. Here’s the quick summary:

• Sparc will have 128 cores by 2015, up from 32 today. It will also have the potential for more than 16,000 computing threads, up from 512 today. Memory capacity will increase from 4TB today to 64TB in 2015.
• Solaris 11 is due out next year, six years after Solaris 10 came out in 2005. It is expected to include improvements in every facet of the operating system, from processor core and thread support to networking and security support.

“With Sparc, we are committing to at least doubling performance levels every two years,” Oracle systems chief John Fowler said. “We will scale to thousands of threads and multiple terabytes of memory.”

All in all, if Oracle follows through on this, that is some impressive stuff. Oracle has been the brunt of some bad news in the wake of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, including poor server sales results and reports that IT shops are leaving the Sun hardware platform. Much of the worry revolving around Oracle-Sun earlier was its virtual nonexistent roadmaps for Sparc and Solaris.

Now that those are in place, Oracle has better ground to be able to retain existing Sun hardware customers, and possibly go out and get some more. We’ll see what happens.