views from the trenches
Archive for the ‘Musings’ Category.
Kevin Closson gives those of us who aren’t pushing a million IOPS several reasons to consider the Sunacle Exadata 2 Database Thingamajig.
Unfortunately, Kevin failed to mention a potential downside of having one of these babies. Namely, your developers and consultants will assume (even more than they probably already do) that whatever junk code they throw at the machine will run flawlessly. And if it doesn’t, it must be the DBA or Unix team’s fault.
Am I the only one who thinks it a little entertaining that a bunch of EMC bloggers are going crazy over Oracle not supporting VMware (an EMC subsidiary)? Particularly a week after Oracle showed off its new Exadata beast made from the (soon-to-be-Oracle) Sun parts bin?
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but it seems a bit strange that one vendor (EMC) is asking its customers to harangue another vendor (Oracle). This is the bad part about using best-of-breed – there’s always the potential for finger-pointing. Why remind customers of this right when a competitor is going vertical, instead of highlighting how much better value you might be able to provide?
The Register is reporting that Larry Ellison has been telling folks that with the pending Sun acquisition, Oracle is positioning itself to become the next, old IBM.
My big takeaway is that Oracle has positioned itself as a soup-to-nuts vendor. That is, they will be able to sell you every part of the system, from the SPARC server running Solaris, to the StorageTek tape backup, to the Oracle database, to the business application, which just happens to be written in Java.
This isn’t too terribly different from what Jonathan Schwartz was saying recently, that Sun provided the technology stack. Except that Sun had no applications to tie into – particularly since so many Oracle customers jumped ship and ran to Linux in the last decade. Obviously, Oracle now has plenty of reason to try to convince everyone to return.
Whether or not the strategy works, I still think Solaris is the best operating system on the block, and would love to see a reinvigorated SPARC platform as a viable option.