There's been a lot of speculation that Oracle purchased Sun for its software assets like Java, Solaris, and--although this point has seen more debate--MySQL. Even those of us who viewed the acquisition as a serious play by Oracle to become a full-fledged system vendor figured those systems would be mostly x86. That's not to say Oracle would kill SPARC processor development and servers outright--the installed base is too large and profitable--but it would be a business to milk, not to invest in.
However, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, writing in an e-mail interview with Reuters, claims to have big plans for Sun's server business--including its in-house processor design capabilities.
Ellison begins by stating that "we are definitely not going to exit the hardware business." It doesn't get much more definitive than that as to Oracle's overall strategy of being a systems company.
What Ellison has in mind here is integration. He goes on to write that:
While most hardware businesses are low-margin, companies like Apple and Cisco enjoy very high-margins because they do a good job of designing their hardware and software to work together. If a company designs both hardware and software, it can build much better systems than if they only design the software. That's why Apple's iPhone is so much better than Microsoft phones.
Those are fair points. And Oracle has itself experimented with hardware/software integration such as the Exadata Storage Server that uses HP hardware.
At the same time, the idea that you can be in the server business and only sell into the profitable niches strikes me as a notion that Oracle may not want to depend upon too much. (Cisco has made similar statements with respect to its Unified Computing System.) The history of the system vendor business going back at least a decade suggests that the most successful companies have supply chains and partner networks that allow them to sell pallets of small servers in addition to a smaller number of highly profitable large ones.
Ellison then goes on to make it equally clear that he's not interested in just bundling software and hardware but deeply optimizing the hardware when he writes: "Once we own Sun we're going to increase the investment in SPARC. We think designing our own chips is very, very important... Right now, SPARC chips do some things better than Intel chips and vice-versa."
By way of background, Sun's CMT SPARC chips are designed around a philosophy of handling many tasks in parallel even if it means that individual tasks may run somewhat slower than on a chip with fewer but more powerful cores. This approach lends itself well to workloads that involve a lot of relatively independent activities--such as Web and application servers. It also lends itself to very power-efficient designs.
But Ellison isn't just arguing that SPARC is good for some things and x86 is good for others. He's arguing for hardware that is truly optimized for Oracle software.
Some system features work much better if they are implemented in silicon rather than software. Once we own Sun, we'll be able to plan and synchronize new features from silicon to software, just like IBM and the other big system suppliers. We want to work with Fujitsu to design advanced features into the SPARC microprocessor aimed at improving Oracle database performance.
There remain plenty of questions about how large Oracle's investments will be and how much it will tilt toward its own processor-server-operating system-middleware-applications stack. It will, of course, continue to sell software to run on HP, IBM, Dell, or wherever else it can garner license revenue from.
However, on the face of it Oracle has grand visions for its Sun acquisition that go well beyond selectively mining some key software assets and milking the rest. Oracle's purchase of Sun was the latest example of the general shift back to a more vertically-integrated computer industry going on. This latest interview with Ellison makes that point again--with exclamation points.
Earlier this week, Sun Microsystems launched a family of new servers based on the SPARC64 VII processor. In contrast to Sun's "CMT" (Chip Multithreading) UltraSPARC T1 and T2 designs that deliver aggregate performance using a large number of threads, SPARC64 takes a more conventional approach that is more rooted in parallelism and performance at the level of a single thread. This design is more attuned with the performance requirements of typical enterprise back-end applications and databases, whereas CMT has more of a network-facing orientation.
SPARC64 comes from Sun's partner Fujitsu, which also designs and builds the midrange and high-end servers that use the chip; these systems went by the "APL" codename while they were under development. Fujitsu and Sun jointly sell these servers--as well as the CMT "Niagara' boxes for which Sun does the processor and server development.
The new processor and servers are solid upgrades. Although not as multi-threaded as Niagara, the SPARC64 VII bumps the number of cores per chip to four, and adds the ability to run two threads on each of those cores--a technique that helps mask delays associated with waiting for data to arrive from memory. Frequency is also up from the prior generation to 2.4 GHz and 2.52 GHz.
Sun pegs the performance boost over the prior generation at up to about 80 percent for commercial applications, and up to 2x on apps that are floating point-intensive. That's a nice increment, considering that upgrades from the SPARC64 VI servers require only CPU board upgrades. While I find that vendors often overplay the issues associated with competitors' "forklift" hardware upgrades and other supposed gotchas, there's no doubt that less is more when it comes to making infrastructure changes.
Overall, there's little to fault in this announcement from a product perspective. It's a solid, nondisruptive bump to a product line that--although Sun doesn't break out numbers--must contribute a substantial chunk of its server revenue.
My critique instead relates to how Sun (again) seemed almost bored by this announcement. Yes, there was a press release--it wasn't exactly a stealth launch--but there was certainly none of the mass marketing air cover that Sun (for better or worse) is wont to darken the skies with when it comes to something that it's genuinely excited about. No blog postings from its pony-tailed Blogger-in-Chief. No glitzy roll-out.
Don't get me wrong, many of the things that get Sun's corporate blood flowing such as open storage, OpenSolaris, Project BlackBox, ZFS and solid state disk, and Niagara are genuinely exciting. But many are also speculative. It would behoove Sun to at least make the old college try to display some comparable enthusiasm about products that are proven and bringing in real revenues.
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