Oracle hunger fallout: Will Red Hat survive? Why let the Oracle/BEA spat die when you can open a hulking can of gasoline and pour fuel over the fire? Open Season Episode 6 does just that with the help of former JBoss chief Marc Fleury. The now very wealthy software maverick joined me, Matt Asay (Alfresco) and Dave Rosenberg (Mulesource) for a deep look at what's going on …
Yes, the title is regarding the comment at the end of the show (if you haven't listened, do)
Overall, very interesting show. I would like to comment on the vmware opensource part, however.
The truth is, as far as I can see, that the benifit of VMware going opensource, for the custumor, would be minimal. Having free versions of the product lets anyone who doesn't have the money to buy it use it. The really nice features of VMWare all require a SAN. If you can afford a SAN, I don't think the licence will be that big of an issue. For small guys, vmware-server is "good enough".
To the custumor, opensource doesn't mather as much as we like to think (myself included), simply because most users do not want/cannot look at the source code.
> The really nice features of VMWare all require a SAN.
This isn't true. iSCSI will provide all the same functionality that you'd get from a SAN, at least as far as a VMware ESX cluster would care. Arguably faster than a SAN, too (depending how much you like trunking). And definitely plenty big time cheaper than a SAN.
The last is probably the most important -- setting up a separate GbE network using commodity switches, commodity NICs, commodity SAS/SATA drives in a commodity box running commodity software (GNU/Linux) to create your own phatdisk is becoming particularly compelling.
iSCSI gets me to about A$2K / TB - but the great thing is the non-linear premium of adding new servers (compare and contrast most port-based FC switch costing plans and exxy HBA's).
I enjoyed the analysis from Marcf, and the questions from the hosts were truly informed. I would say that Marc was a bit coy about how much JBoss contributed to the end times of WebLogic growth, and that his $25/share price point for an ORCL acquisition is a bit off, but overall a great take.
As far as the Red Hat situation goes, JBoss is the lead product going forward, with Linux being saturated as revenue production growth being known. Going in to accounts, JBoss sales engineers will be the chief negotiators for Red Hat opportunities, and any thoughts on a "trapped asset" ignores the realities of the target markets they'll have.
Good job, all involved, this is a great session.
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