Oracle's hardware gambit: Not so crazy

Larry Ellison is finally in the hardware business. Maybe the second time's a charm.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison

(Credit: Dan Farber)

In the late 1990s, Ellison tried to drum up support for a network-based computer. He barnstormed around the country with Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy and made the case for a thin-client alternative to the Wintel duopoly. They were so convincing that Intel embarked upon a crash course to squeeze down costs before the NC could ever get going. Intel prevailed in that contest and Ellison moved on.

Now he's back on a considerably bigger scale--not to mention on more familiar turf.

Oracle's announcement this afternoon qualifies as big news. So does its burgeoning development relationship with Hewlett-Packard, which may be even bigger news. (HP's Ann Livermore noted that HP and Oracle already share about 150,000 joint customers worldwide. If the companies don't blow what looks to be a big opportunity, that number can only grow.)

Oracle's got a lot more riding on its "data warehouse appliance" (as Mark Hurd described the HP Oracle Database Machine) than in the days when the network computer was Ellison's rallying cry. The first units feature 168 terabytes of disk data and 64 Intel cores. HP, which made the systems according to an Oracle design, will supply hardware support. Customers still have to order the machines from Oracle, which should make Ellison happy about the opportunity for his sales team to to cultivate (and sell) that customer list to their hearts' content.

Forrester's James Kobielus noted that Oracle had demonstrated that it can now scale its DW/DBMS platform to address the petabyte-scale analytics requirements that will soon come into the enterprise mainstream everywhere."

Indeed, Ellison made the case that customers will receive better performance because Oracle has coupled its database software with custom hardware. Dana Gardner, who has a good writeup of the event, points out that in this case, the idea is to bring the "intelligence closer to the data, that is bringing the Exadata Programmable Storage Server appliance into close proximity to the Oracle database servers, and then connecting them through InfiniBand connections."

How these two companies were able to keep this secret for most of the three years it took to complete the project is a source of some chagrin to the Fourth Estate and associated blogger types who follow this stuff. But the announcement is already being hailed as "earth shattering"--and perhaps the hyperbole this time isn't so over the top.

[brill256]

I just wonder why anyone on earth would spend the money on Oracle when you could use MySQL, save like a squillion dollars, and get better performance. On RHEL 5, MySQL absolutely spanks Oracle on nearly every benchmark I've run.

[ferricoxide]

Scalability and support.

[ferricoxide]

Now, the question is, will the consultants they send out to deploy these things be any more clueful than the current lot of bozos they send out on RAC deployments?

[Penguinisto]

He's a bit late to the party (See also Citrix, LTSP, etc... ) :)

To be honest, I love MySQL, and in most simple DB aspects, it is the best option - but until you can (as only one of many examples) do two-way full replication without having to jigger around in Federated Tables (and even then it's still an experimental thing, as late as MySQL 5.1), Oracle on RAC is basically going to be top dog in distributed DB's for awhile.

*sigh* If only Postgres got wider exposure and wasn't such a screaming b!tch for most DBAs to work in...

@ferricoxide: The consultants will still likely preach the old-time religion (let me sum it up: $$$$!), and you;re still going to have to hold their hand vis-a-vis hardware, networking, etc etc...

/P

[idfubar]

Is it possible that bloggers (and the "Fourth Estate", which did such a good job in the run-up to the Iraq War) really only know what companies want them to know? At any rate good job on the article and kudos for remembering the Network Computer!

[kevinclosson]

I'd like to offer the following link where readers can find technical information about Exadata:
http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/exadata-posts/