When Oracle announced the Exadata V2 database appliance late last year, it created quite a stir. The performance numbers for the box are extremely high, and the feature set and capacity are quite large.

Last week we had an executive briefing for folks interested in Exadata V2. My colleagues Kurt Rosenfeld and John Laferrier presented information on business intelligence and the Exadata, as well as the business case and use cases for considering buying one. Joe LaFlamme from Oracle presented some reference customer examples.

I presented the Exadata V2 technical overview, traveling through the architecture details, migration strategies, and component details. Along the way there were a few points I made that seemed a bit surprising to the audience, and that led to a lively discussion. I summarize those points here, as they do not seem to be well known within the industry.

• Existing Oracle licenses are transferable to Exadata (including Oracle DB, RAC, and Partitioning). That can greatly reduce the cost of an Exadata that is being used for database consolidation, for example.

• The Exadata looks to be an excellent consolidation engine. Included with the Exadata software are resource management tools that can, for example, give some databases resource priority over others. These tools also allow the use of the flash storage to be fine tuned, pinning specific tables into flash or letting Oracle use the flash as an extended cache.

• The Exadata V2 is designed to be able to perform OLTP and Data Warehouse transactions concurrently. If a single system can be used both ways, consider the implications compared to stand-alone, separate Data Warehouse solutions. Normally data must be extracted from the OLTP system, copied to the DW system, imported there, and then processed. The extraction and copying are overhead, on both the OLTP and DW systems. And, any reports or queries on the DW system are performed against “stale data” – data from the time the extraction started. Now consider being able to do DW operations against live, current OLTP data. And according to the performance numbers published by Oracle, those operations could run much faster than on most DW systems. That speed could result in completing more complex reports, the allowing of more ad hoc queries, and so on. Such a change could be a fundamental advantage to DW consumers (finance and senior management, for example).

Read more…

The questions are going to continue here until Oracle officially owns Sun and perhaps beyond. Will Oracle sell the Sun hardware business? As I have said in the past, I do not think they will. I could certainly be wrong and many industry analysts think I am. Here are a few new data points to think about:

1. The rumor mill continues to churn and CNNMoney.com is suggesting that HP may want to purchase the Sun hardware business. HP has the cash, but does the investment make sense? Would Oracle sell Solaris as well? HP would be in a tough position if they bought the hardware but Oracle still owned Solaris. Interestingly, in the article, CNNMoney points Mark Hurd at HP out as the unnamed “Party B” in the Sun regulatory filings.
2. Oracle ran this front page ad in the Wall Street Journal today promoting Oracle DB on Sun SPARC. Is this just Oracle bluffing? Perhaps.
3. If Oracle wants to be in the appliance space, I believe they need to sell general purpose servers. Without the volume that comes from selling general purpose servers, the cost of the appliance platform goes through the roof. Oracle would also have a difficult time getting specialized hardware without paying a premium for a small production run of servers.
4. Oracle and Larry Ellison want to own the IT budget. The “save money on hardware and spend it on Oracle software” go to market strategy  was nothing short of brilliant. Keeping the Sun hardware business is Ellison’s opportunity to compete head to head with IBM. Oracle would have all the applications and the hardware to run it on. That would be quite a legacy for Ellison.

The US Department of Justice as approved the acquisition. Now, the European Union needs to make a decision before we will get any more answers.

Why is there such a buzz among the analyst, press, and blogging community that Oracle is going to sell of the Sun hardware business? It makes no sense to me. I shared my thoughts on the acquisition in a previous post, but I am going to elaborate a bit here. Not only do I believe Oracle will continue selling Sun hardware, I think it is the primary reason they bought Sun.

Why would Oracle spend $7.4B to buy Sun? Is it for Solaris? I don’t think so. Solaris is open source and Sun would have welcomed Oracle’s help in tuning the operating system for Oracle’s software applications. Is it for Java? That is a little more plausible, but there was no need for Oracle to control Java. As far as I know, Sun was not doing anything to make it difficult for Oracle to use Java. Oracle is buying Sun for the hardware business. The hardware (and support) business is what generates the revenue at Sun.

I would like to share a few relevant quotes. The first comes from Larry Ellison in a recent interview. He did his best to shut down the rumor mill churning on what will happen to Sun’s hardware business.

Interviewer – “Are you going to exit the hardware business?”

Read more…

A few weeks ago, it looked like IBM was going to make a deal to purchase Sun. That fell through when the Sun board could not come to agreement. On April 20th, with very little rumor in the marketplace, Oracle announced they were buying Sun for $7.4B in cash. What does this mean for the new company?

• To quote a recent Oracle publication, “Oracle plans to engineer and deliver an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together, so customers do not have to do it themselves.” Sun is already shipping Infiniband switches and blades with InfiniBand on the motherboard. They have also mentioned IB is on the roadmap for the Sun 7000. Andy Bechtolsheim mentioned it at the Sun product announcement on April 14th. What about an integrated Oracle appliance running on Nehalem blades, Solaris x64,  Sun 7000 storage, and using Infiniband switches. It should not be a major technology leap to put it all together. What would this mean for the Oracle/HP appliance?
• Sun SPARC processors are at an Oracle pricing disadvantage to IBM Power processors in the current Oracle pricing model. Oracle has never been afraid to use pricing to move the market in their direction. Watch for them to use their pricing model to encourage customer to buy Sun servers.
• Solaris x64 has been intentionally neglected by Oracle. Oracle delivers patches on Solaris SPARC and Linux immediately. Then, they have historically waited up to 6 months to release that same patch for Solaris x64. In the past, this has helped Oracle push their Linux agenda in the marketplace. Given the ease of porting the Oracle patches to Solaris x64, there is no logical technical reason for this lag. Watch for Solaris x64 to become a first class citizen in the Oracle OS support matrix now that growth of Solaris x64 means growth for Oracle.

Read more…