The Pervasive Data Center

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.

One of the favorite water-cooler games of the enterprise computing set over the past month or so has been, "Whither Sun Microsystems?" Now the first phase of that game is over. The answer, as of this morning, is: Oracle--subject to the usual approvals, of course.

But the next phase of the the game is just beginning.

It's obviously very early in the process but here are a few initial reactions:

At first blush, this acquisition may seem odd. Oracle is a software company. Sun tends to be viewed as a hardware company. Why would Oracle CEO Larry Ellison want to get into the hardware business? That's the standard "Huh???" about this purchase. But this misses a number of important points.

Sun is not a hardware company. It is a systems company. And, in fact, Sun has steadily ramped up its software business in recent years. Sun Solaris and Java were instrumental in Oracle's decision to acquire Sun. So this isn't really a software company buying a hardware one.

To get the bigger picture here you have to view it in the context of what's going on within the system vendor landscape more broadly. At the risk of overstating things, the system vendor landscape is being reconstituted into big, highly integrated companies that can do it all.

This is how essentially all computer companies used to be, but that way of business gave way to the horizontal industry structure epitomized by the likes of Microsoft and Intel.

Oracle has poked at this sort of thing before. Unbreakable Linux and in-house virtualization work were early efforts. But the purchase of Sun lets Oracle take this to the next level. Consider these sound bites from the press conference: "Tightly integrate the Oracle database to some of the unique high-end features of Solaris," Sun's operating system; "for the first time deliver complete integrated computer systems, applications to disk;" and deliver "complete industry-in-a-box."

This is not to say that Oracle may not divest or shutter segments of Sun's portfolio that don't post the right kind of financial return. But this looks to me like a very serious play to vertically integrate. With their applications portfolio, it's actually a more vertical integration than even IBM offers directly, for the most part. (IBM does have some industry-specific solutions but not at the same scale as Oracle Financials and Manufacturing.)

If there were any doubt that the pendulum is in full swing back to large, integrated systems companies, this should erase it. We had IBM and Hewlett-Packard (most recently with its EDS acquisition). Now we have Oracle. And Cisco Systems is easing over that way.

The AdvFS file system has had a bittersweet history. When introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1990s for DEC's Unix flavor (which would eventually become Tru64 UNIX), AdvFS was one of the most capable--if not the most capable--Unix file systems in existence.

As a 1999 Illuminata research note by my colleague Jonathan Eunice said: "Tru64 UNIX has the features one expects of a top-drawer enterprise Unix: multiprocessing, multithreading, disk volume management, a journaling file system, multi-path I/O, extensive TCP/IP networking, and conformance with a range of de jure and de facto standards. Its AdvFS filesystem, 64-bit and large memory support, and Memory Channel cluster interconnect provide a tour de force in high-scale system design." (See also this 1996 Unix scorecard.)

However, Tru64--along with the Alpha processor on which it ran--was one of the casualties when HP purchased Compaq (which had earlier absorbed DEC). AdvFS itself seemingly got a reprieve when HP decided to port it to HP-UX along with its associated, and equally well-regarded, TruCluster clustering environment. However, in 2004, HP killed the delayed project and went with the third-party Veritas Storage Foundation instead.

Today, AdvFS gets yet another life as HP makes the source code for AdvFS available to the Open Source community. Specifically, according to the press release, "HP will contribute the code as a reference implementation of an enterprise Linux file system under the terms of General Public License Version 2 for compatibility with the Linux kernel, as well as provide design documentation, test suites and engineering resources."

That's a fair bit of history I know. However, I thought at least a little context was necessary before diving under the covers.

What's being contributed? As HP says, the source code for AdvFS and related resources. This includes both the original "mature" version for Tru64 and the version for the worked-on port to HP-UX, which included some improvements and updates. HP describes the latter as a "feature complete port." However, I take that as meaning that 90 percent of the development work is done, so that only "the other 90 percent" of development, test, QA, tuning, and so forth is left to do. (After all, if it were almost ready to go into production, presumably HP would have completed the project rather than gone the Veritas route.)

What's not being contributed? This announcement strictly concerns the Tru64 file system; it does not include TruCluster--which builds atop Tru64, but is a separate product.

When will AdvFS be available as a file system for Linux? Short answer: probably never. One Wikipedia contributor amusingly opines: "anyone should be able to port it to the Linux kernel and get it into mainline." However, the reality is that although AdvFS code may assist with and its design documents may inform future Open Source file system work, it's highly unlikely that AdvFS qua AdvFS will be plopped into Linux in its current form.

What file system project(s) could make use of AdvFS? In the relatively near-term, ext4 is the next new file system that we're likely to see widely deployed on Linux. It's a largely incremental enhancement to the ubiquitous ext3 that focuses on larger file and file system sizes as well as various performance tweaks. Versions of ext4 are starting to appear in community releases such as Fedora 9. HP, among many others, has been involved in ext4 development, but AdvFS itself won't have a big impact here. Rather, it's Btrfs (pronounced "butter f s") with which HP is looking to hookup AdvFS.

What is Btrfs? In general terms, think of Btrfs as a "next generation file system," which is to say one that moves beyond the administration and availability models used by current file systems. Although the specifics are quite different, Sun's ZFS is another example. From its project page on kernel.org: "Btrfs is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration. Initially developed by Oracle, Btrfs is licensed under the GPL and open for contribution from anyone."

What's HP's interest? HP has contributed to a wide range of Open Source projects over time, but this goes beyond generic community goodness. Oracle kicked off Btrfs but is apparently interested in moving it beyond being just "an Oracle filesystem project." As for HP, AdvFS (and TruCluster) were long part-and-parcel of a close development relationship with Oracle involving database clustering. It's pretty clear to me that Oracle wanted more companies involved with Btrfs development; AdvFS was a highly relevant technological bauble for HP to bring as a housewarming present for one of its most important partners.

Bottom line: Especially given the great success that its ProLiant and BladeSystem lines have been enjoying, HP has a vested interest in the continued success of Linux and its ability to scale to larger and larger workloads. A lot of that growth is about rapidly growing data, so a next generation file system is going to be needed at some point. Btrfs per se is speculative, with production deployments even in the 2011 or 2012 timeframe seeming optimistic given the slow cadence of file system roll outs. (It's customers' data we're talking about here, after all. Sun took a good couple of years to start seriously rolling out ZFS even after it was nominally "ready.") But making AdvFS resources available gives Open Source developers the opportunity for useful insights into how a sophisticated production file system should work. Especially to the degree that AdvFS wins some points with a major partner, it's a nice way to leverage some IP that would otherwise mostly go to waste.