Slashdot Log In
Oracle Switching To Linux
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jan 31, 2002 03:42 PM
from the there's-floor-room-at-lwce-for-larry dept.
from the there's-floor-room-at-lwce-for-larry dept.
Bill Kendrick writes: "This Computerworld story quotes Oracle CEO Larry Ellison as saying 'We'll be on Linux no later than the summer, so we'll be running our whole business on Linux." When asked what this means for Unix vendors like Sun... "It will be several years before the big machine dies, but inevitably the big machine will die.' Ouch!"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Oracle Switching To Linux
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 539 comments
(Spill at 50!) | Index Only
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
|
2
Re:Yeah, right... (Score:4, Informative)
for starters, you are comparing a dual cpu box with a quad cpu box. The quad's always cost more per cpu. Simple matter of the fact that it is harder to get 4 cpus' to talk together compared to only 2 (why do you think intel has yet to produce a 64 way smp server.... sun did it 5 years ago, cray did it before them.) You also have to look at things like backplane contention (are all of those cpu's on the same bus? sucks to be you if they are)
anyway, yes, sun boxes cost more than their intel counterparts in the low to mid range. That said, I have yet to find an intel box that does what the X1 can do for the low end, and once you get to 8 ways systems, intel starts to disappear from the map (and the sun boxes are the same cost or cheaper).
Now, we got the hardware price argument out of the way.
when making a decision, there are 3 major areas to consider: Price, Performance and Reliability. Only an idiot would focus on price when the cost of downtime is a million an hour.
The real reason i purchase sun boxes is not because they are the fastest. You want fast cpu's? Go get an intel box.
here are the main reasons I continue to purchase sun boxes:
#1) Sun's support organization. It is second to none. period, end of story. You have a problem, they fix it. I had a failed disk earlier this week, the support rep's first response was to send a tech on site that day.
#2) When they boast about binary compatibility from $1,000 to $10,000,000, they are not kidding. I can give the developers a low end box and know that the app will still work on a mid to high end box
#3) It just works. I dont get the "what glib are you using", "is that rev XYZ of that nic?" or any of that other crap.
#4) the hardware seems to last forever and ever and ever. And sun supports the stuff for a long time. Every try and get dell to support a six year old box? yeah, good luck.
#5) did i mention the support?
#6) it was built to be managed from a serial port and live on a network from day 1. I love the fact that i can put all of my servers in a colo, walk out, and do the OS install from home. I know that PC's are now beginning to get to the point where you can hook a serial cable up and get them to boot from the net and do an os install. lets face it, there are whole books on how to use jumpstart in the sun environment and do 100% hands off installs. It just works, and it is fully supported.
So, as you can see, there is more to the decision than just cost. In the world that i work in, time is money, and the hardware cost is a very small percentage of the TCO.
Re:Yeah, right... (Score:5, Informative)
(1) Sun's support is great if you are in the right area. Check with companies in smaller centers to see what kind of support they are getting, and how long it takes to get a good engineer out to resolve any serious issues.
(3) Isn't quite true. The OS is only the foundation, and you rapidly find that you need this particular OS patch for Sybase, another for DB/2, another for Encina, Tuxedo, Websphere, ... If you can find a combination of packages that can agree on patch levels, count yourself lucky! The only advantage Sun has here is a better coordination of patches than standalone Linux.
(4) You have got to be kidding! Sun's CPUs, memory modules, and hard drives fail at least as often as other vendors. Personal experience would indicate IBM and HP as the most reliable, but I have no empirical evidence to support that observation.
Your point on price not being relevant is largely true. The cost of the physical hardware is trivial compared to maintenance staff, software licenses, development costs, and cascading downtime.
Re:Yeah, right...not (Score:4, Informative)
Let me guess, you have a multimilion contract and they had a newbey which could use some training :-)...
#2) When they boast about binary compatibility frSo, as you can see, there is more to the decision than just cost. In the world that i work in, time is money, and the hardware cost is a very small percentage of the TCO.om $1,000 to $10,000,000, they are not kidding. I can give the developers a low end box and know that the app will still work on a mid to high end box
eeuh, 2 posibilities here : a) you're talking hw, and i don't understand you at all. The only one which did care for downward campatibilit was INTEL (also only reason why it stayed popular) b) you're talking about software and then it's just stupid. Just recompiling you're app for newer hardware gives you a better performing app. Binary compatibility is just a stinky way to be able to hide theire source.
#3) It just works. I dont get the "what glib are you using", "is that rev XYZ of that nic?" or any of that other crap.
#4) the hardware seems to last forever and ever and ever. And sun supports the stuff for a long time. Every try and get dell to support a six year old box? yeah, good luck.
Right, but for SUN's 1x price I can get a a newer box each year.
#5) did i mention the support?
Euch you mean the part where you get forwarded from helpdesk to helpdesk and finaly get a ticketnumber saying you're in their problem database ???
#6) it was built to be managed from a serial port and live on a network from day 1. I love the fact that i can put all of my servers in a colo, walk out, and do the OS install from home. I know that PC's are now beginning to get to the point where you can hook a serial cable up and get them to boot from the net and do an os install. lets face it, there are whole books on how to use jumpstart in the sun environment and do 100% hands off installs. It just works, and it is fully supported.
Correct yourself here too.. you are talking about the UNIX way, not about the SUN way. The same can easily and much cheaper be achieved on PC hw with a free unix like bsd or linux.
So, as you can see, there is more to the decision than just cost. In the world that i work in, time is money, and the hardware cost is a very small percentage of the TCO.
Please stop glorifying SUN, the only reason you need them is because they have an IT department with a legal department to back them up. (which is the key for most of their businesses) For the rest it's just a big corp not much diffrent from M$ : some brilliant guys and lot's of morron's acting important
--red
Gold Medal (Score:3, Funny)
I think we can chalk this up as a win.
GO LINUX!
Re:Gold Medal (Score:5, Funny)
I think we can chalk this up as a win.
Oh yeah, big win! Linux replaced THREE SERVERS! 783,472,991 to go!
Re:Gold Medal (Score:5, Interesting)
The article also said that they would also provide FULL system support for Linux. That's a really big plus. The IT managers know that if they deploy Linux that Oracle will back them up if anything goes wrong.
Big, big win.
.
Licensing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
All of that said, if oracle can get you to get rid of your 72CPU SunFire 15K and replace it with a 128 single cpu intel boxes..... (extra intel boxes to make up for the lost ram and system bandwidth in the 15K)
Lets see what that would cost ya...
list price for a 72 cpu license for a single box is 2.9 million. List price for those 128 cpu's w/ RAC will cost ya 7.6 million.
Lots of smaller, "cheaper" systems can often cost less overall. This is not the case here, where the price delta more than makes up for the cost of the big sun box, and we dont even have to get into the argument over the extra cost involved in managing 128 different systems. (besides, RAC is not a 'shared nothing' cluster, so management of large clusters is a real pain)
anyway, larry is always going to need sun to produce the big boxes for its big clients.
Re:Licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
It is very poorly supported by oracle.
I had to do a lot of tweaking, (editing kernel headers, etc)
However, since i got it to work, it has totally outperformed the windows NT implementation.
For one thing, it has uptime of 200+ days.
Re:Licensing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Will they access Linux with NC's? (Score:5, Funny)
So THIS is how he plans to get rid of the competition. (Pictures of MIG flown by Larry flying over competitors corporate HQ, surface to air missiles a-flying). Can we all chip in and buy one of these for Linus?
He'll be flying into the airport late again... (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm, gonna be pulling some late nighters there. I'll give him that its good talk. But I bet this is one case where the "sales" department hasn't told the support department their pitch yet.
"YOU TOLD THE CUSTOMERS WE'D DO WHAT?"
Re:Standard Distros (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they will probably only support one or two major distributions of Linux, and they will probably subcontract out to the Linux vendor some of the Linux problems.
This actually makes a lot of sense for Oracle. After all, they want you to spend as little on your hardware and operating system as possible. After all, they are selling a database and applications, not Solaris licenses. If they can cut Sun out of the loop that is billions more in potential profits for them. Their solutions become less expensive (and more competitive) without any loss of profit margin.
The fact of the matter is that the operating system is quickly becoming a commodity. In a few years even Microsoft won't be selling their operating system (that's why they are so desperate to move to a service and support type business).
Re:Standard Distros (Score:4, Insightful)
It would appear the Solaris on Intel has come to the end of the road. Here is the quote from Sun's website.
However, even if Sun wasn't end-of-lifing Solaris for Intel, there are obvious reasons why Oracle can't base their future business plans on the availability of a low-cost version of Solaris on Intel based hardware. The most obvious of these reasons is that Oracle doesn't own Solaris. If Oracle were to start suggesting to their customers that they run Oracle on free copies of Solaris for Intel (instead of Sun's Sparc hardware) then Sun is bound to notice, and they would almost certainly change the license for their Intel version. After all, they can't really let their free Intel version of Solaris cannabalize sales of their Sparc hardware.
Linux, on the other hand, is safe because Oracle has as much control over it as they need. Since Oracle has access to the source code they can easily customize Linux to their particular needs.
Larry is right, it sucks to be in the operating systems business right now. Especially if you are trying to sell a Unix-like operating system (although Microsoft is feeling the pinch as well). Linux on commodity hardware continues to improve at a remarkable pace, and you can't beat the price.
Re:Standard Distros (Score:4, Interesting)
In a situation like that, support shouldn't really be a big problem, at least no bigger than normal.
I guess if you're installing your 8 processor Oracle database server on a LinuxFromScratch box, you'd probably be on your own.
.
most telling Ellison sentence (Score:3, Interesting)
nuff said.
Canibalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, ironically, Linux is eating into Sun's market share, to the delight of OpenSource zealots, who decry Sun simply for being a for-profit corporation. I get the sense that many OpenSourcers are rooting against Sun, and I believe that's an entirely counter-productive position to take.
Microsoft is the enemy of OpenSource, not Sun. Sun may not have open-sourced Java and Solaris, but, hey, they need to make money just like everybody else. Sun has many OpenSource products and has contributed much to the community.
OpenSource and Linux will lose a great deal if Sun goes out of business, and not vice-versa.
Re:Canibalism (Score:4, Insightful)
> contriubuted a lot to the OpenSource community.
I don't disagree with you.
> Now, ironically, Linux is eating into Sun's
> market share, to the delight of OpenSource
> zealots, who decry Sun simply for being a
> for-profit corporation. I get the sense that
> many OpenSourcers are rooting against Sun, and I
> believe that's an entirely counter-productive
> position to take.
To say that Linux is eating into Sun's marketshare is to say that Sun is primarily a software company. It is my understanding that Sun is a Hardware company that provides certain software that is optimized for their hardware.
So, if Sun drops Solaris and adopts Linux, how can that be a loss? They can, after all, begin putting more of their development efforts into making Linux a more native OS for Sparc CPUs.
> Microsoft is the enemy of OpenSource,
Once again, I have to agree. OpenSource is the anathema of Microsoft's way of thinking.
> OpenSource and Linux will lose a great deal if
> Sun goes out of business, and not vice-versa.
Yep. No doubt about it. I figure that the days of UNIX differentiation are close to an end... the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. A beginning of a new time of easy interoperation which will benefit everyone - after all, Sun, IBM, HP, Compaq/Digital, SGI and all the rest can still make the High-End cutting edge hardware and software applications/middleware optimized for their hardware platform.
Maybe Sun can put even more effort into Java to make it faster - maybe even revisiting the hardware implementation angle. What about a drop-in Java Virtual Machine in hardware implemented on a PCI card or something?
Larry to Sun.... (Score:5, Funny)
Unforturnately for Larry, the same quote is being said to him by the Free Software movement....
Heh, no kidding (Score:5, Interesting)
And then somebody discovers this "PostgresSQL" thing....
Payback's a bitch, innit?
DG
http://autocross.dsm.org/books.html
Re:Heh, no kidding (Score:4, Insightful)
What I'm saying here is that the many thousands of dollars per month large companies pay for Oracle is worth the absolute assurance that their database will be usable 24/365(6). Sometimes, it's just cheaper to pay the money than lose out on $100,000,000 worth of money transfers during the hour you're down.
Isn't it a bit ironic... (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps Sun should announce their commitment to PostgreSQL.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... (Score:5, Insightful)
most Oracle users.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I left the industry after clients started using similar glassy-eyed statements about Java. Both Java and Oracle have their place, but considering Oracle's insane price and administration overhead, it needs quite a bit of research before deployment.
Re:Isn't it a bit ironic... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a small fraction of Oracle users that "cannot afford to lose data and/or they need something that you can scale the hell out of." Both of which are not 100% true of Oracle (personal experience(*) here), but true enough that sales droids make good money.
(*)I've had Oracle databases simply go away when the machine crashed (would not even try to recognize the data on disk until a full backup had been restored). Mysql and Postgresql have never done this to me. As for scalability, Oracle is a beast. It costs exponentially more as you get into options like parallel server (which makes it less stable and harder to manage by an order of magnitude), and your hardware costs skyrocket as you have to start buying boxes capable of calculating the last digit of pi. Personally, I don't call that scalable. Call me wierd.
Oracle still not open.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I want to know when they will be announcing that Oracle is Open Source!
larry larry larry... (Score:4, Funny)
It's all about the customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Additionally, who with a production system isn't going to want both the hardware & software reliability and 24/7 support of the caliber that Sun provides?
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux & use it as my primary platform. But I wouldn't deploy my db back-end on it. We used Suns at my last job for very good reasons.
He may take the Sun out of Oracle, but he won't take the Sun out of the users, and if Oracle starts slipping on the Sun support, there's always Sybase.
Exactly. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention that with what Oracle charges for it's very confusing clustering software, it was actually cheaper for my company to buy one more expensive Sun server to run Oracle on than lots of cheap ones + the clustering software. Since Oracle licences are a recurring expensce, and we just had to buy the Sun server up front, the disparity gets even worse.
That reminds me, I have to take the opportunity to rant about Oracle pricing now. They actually charged us for a second license because our Oracle software is located on a NFS-shared network filer. This way, if the hardware of the DB server takes a shit, we can quickly mount the filesystem Oracle lives on, and start it on another box.
They even said they would not have charged us a second license if we had a second machine powered off, which we brought up in the event of a hardware failure. They claimed that Oracle was providing us the benfit to be able to failover quickly. Umm, no, the network filer is. BEA doesn't charge us for this setup. iPlanet doesn't charge us for this setup. Why should you get to?
great! (Score:3, Redundant)
Then replace the proprietary Oracle with open source systems like Postgres and MySQL.
Now we're talking!
Re:And then Ellison backed up his claims... (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember when I worked for ZDNet in '96 we used to make fun of CNet, our main competitor at the time, for purchasing such general domain names. "What, do they think they own everything?"
A few years later, they bought ZDNet.
An astute move for Oracle, great for linux (Score:3, Insightful)
This should also go a long way towards bolstering the impression of Linux in the IT world. If Oracl