Are Oracle's Exadata racks fluffing Apple's iCloud? Oracle did not have a good fiscal Q2, as El Reg reported on Tuesday after the market closed. Server sales plummeted and new software license sales did not grow anywhere near what Ellison & Co expected. But the Exadata and Exalogic lines of machinery were a bright spot, and may well be fluffing up Apple's iCloud. Well, at …
apple had two of the first exa-craps that Oracle created with HP then killed. They only use it for itunes the rest of their business runs on IBM Power.
Most customers are dumping sparc for IBM Power or Intel and Larry knows it just look at the marketshare numbers. While Sun is increasing prices and margin IBM is going head to head with x86 and delivering higher business value.
Larry always talked about being best friends with Steve, but you never heard Steve saying that about Larry, but then again Steve had more than one friend.
Larry needs a better script to read when asked about how many exa-craps they have sold. It was embarrassing when he was caught by the analyst on the earnings call. Mark finally tried to save Larry. From now on people should ask Larry about how many actual exa-craps they have sold (vs. built) and if that is whole racks or a bunch of two nodes.
Something is fishy on Bay.
Yes, that is a good point about "built" or "shipped" vs. "sold." Oracle always says that they have "shipped" x thousand of Exa-xxx. That is for two reasons. They are shipping a ton of demo units to large customers to play with in their dev environment. Second, they are wrapping Exa-xxx into license renewals (i.e. your license renewal, including an Exadata, is $2 million. your license renewal without an Exadata is $2 million).
Hmmm. Lots of bitter jealousy from the IBM bigots. The quote was 30 machines, not just 2 as you attempt to imply. Oracle never claimed to sell many of the HP based systems, so my assumption is that the 30 systems sold were Sun/Oracle based.
I can't answer the question about the number of Exa's sold vs installed vs shipped, but the number that can't be fudged is the revenue number for Exadata and they've said they intend to triple that number this year (2012).
The continued FUD coming from the IBM crowd is hilarious. Exadata is doing extremely well and Oracle is making money hand over fist on it. As stated earlier, ask any customer how much free stuff Oracle has ever given them. I'm pretty sure you'll hear crickets.
Oracles revenue miss was because they did not grow as fast as expected. They still grew faster than IBM's last quarter where IBM grew just 13% versus the compare (well below analysts expectations). Oracle grew 17% with much higher margins than IBM.
"but the number that can't be fudged is the revenue number"
- Actually, Oracle can fudge the Exadata number all it wants as it is not part of the audited financials. They cannot fudge the overall HW number that the auditors sign off on. The overall HW number has been down double digits every quarter since Oracle acquired Sun. If we assume that Oracle is telling the truth about Exadata (the very carefully worded truth, lawyerly as ever at Oracle), that means that legacy Sun, as I discussed below, is possible the worst fail and most rapid implosion in the history of tech. You can't have it both ways. Either Exadata is doing well and legacy Sun (Sparc) has just disintegrated, or they are both struggling.
"As stated earlier, ask any customer how much free stuff Oracle has ever given them. I'm pretty sure you'll hear crickets."
- No, it is not at all free. It is *included* with their software renewal. Oracle frequently discounts portions of their software stack in order to sell other, high profit, software. A free Exadata is the most expensive server on the market, after you figure in the software costs. If you buy an Exa-xxx and lock yourself into Oracle, you deserve whatever comes your way in support hikes. You cannot say you didn't know.
"It is *included* with their software renewal."
A bit like how FAT-related licensing is "included" in non-discloseable deals used to suggest that Microsoft owns Linux? Naaah, can't be. King Larry would not steep so low as to copy the competion's shady methods (and don't call me Shirley).
On second thought... you may call me Shirley, but be gentle.
--
Good capitalists, great capitalists, all that.
iClod is nothing more than an iSync .... where's the productivity Apps?? Where's the email apps? Where's the SUBSTANCE??? ALL of these things ARE IN REAL Cloud services like those offered for over a year now by MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AMAZON!
CrApple = the Great iNOvator. All Spin and no Substance.
SIRI on an British iPhone .... "Huh? Speak Cupertino English"
What no one recognizes in all the Exa-xxx fervor is that, if the Exa-xxx are selling as well as Oracle claims, that means legacy Sun is absolutely falling apart. They claim that Exa-xxx will have $1 billion in annualized sales by the end of Q4 (Oracle's fiscal) or six months. That means that they are likely running at around $200 million per quarter. Their entire HW business is about $950 million a quarter. Before Oracle acquired Sun, legacy Sun did around $2 billion per quarter in HW. If you take out the Exa-xxx revenue, they are down around $750 million per quarter. In other words, legacy Sun is approaching losing 2/3s of their sales since the Oracle acquisition.
It might be that Oracle is loosing HW business right now, but that is because people does not want to buy SPARC64 gear. They dont want to buy Niagara T3 gear neither. Instead they waited with their buys, until T4 arrived, which do have wicked performance. I am convinced that customers now will buy again.
If a company announces that a new hardware is coming which is much faster, then most customers will put their buys on hold. When the new HW arrives, they buy. It is obvious.
If that is true, Sun customers have been holding off on purchasing new servers for the last five years (as their sales have been falling precipitously for five years). They won't want to buy SPARC64 because it no longer exists in the M Series. That is a dead line.
The T4 was such a non-event. What did they bring to Sparc? Out of order execution. It has been in Power for yeaaars as well as Xeon. The Java benchmark is a complete farse. Oracle used twice the amount of memory and three times the disk as the Power configuration they used as a comparison. T4 is about at the level of the first Nehalem shipment. Not to mention, Oracle has just abused the Sparc install base with support hikes and services cuts.... They have also made it clear that they could care less about them unless they are running Oracle software. There are two types of Sparc customers. Those that have migrated and those that are planning to migrate.
Retailer, Amway, realy! How the world of pyramid selling has changed.
What I find with most storage solutions is that for many a year it has been a case of having just enough storage and buy new storage as and when needed instead of budgeting your 5 year plan and going we will need X amount and buying it there and then. Facct being storage devices until certain floods have been declining in costs and doubleing in size quicker than most accoutants can balance the books.
So when I read exabyte systems, I'm thinking it was only a few years ago when you read terabyte system's and now there your desktops you play solataire upon nowadays. Though alot gets used for trancient data and in apples case it's mearly linking umpteen accounts to have X track on there account so for a user to have say 2gb of music from itunes would effectivly mean very little extra storage beyond marking upon there account which tracks from the apple selection they have purchased. That and documents wont take up much. It then gets down to media like piuctures and video's and this is pretty much from a end-cloud-user were you would start seeing any meaningful volume of data that would be unique.
So for end users and in apples case I suspect once things settle that there storage usage growth per day will be factored by how many megapixels they include on the latest iPhones of the time. Say the next one doubles the resolution then I'd expect a increase in data volumes for could users.
Still at least this whole cloud model gives those mainframe peeps oldschool planning skills some dusting off.
As for Orcle and old Larry, I always found him too smug to be likeable enough to care what they do sadly, but thats just me - possibly.
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Wunderbar1 suggested, "The T4 was such a non-event."
The T4 Launch was awesome!
http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2011/09/sparc-t4-launched-2010-09-26.html
When I spoke to the salespeople this month, I told them the T4 was just what we have been waiting for. They told me that other customers have been expressing the same sentiment and they agree the T4 has been what they have been waiting for. OEM's and Customers are both ordering T4's, to port and implement systems on.
If OEM's, customers, and sales people alike are agreeing the T4 release was a great watershed moment, anonymous industry partisan posts on the internet are really irrelevant.
My first T4-4's are coming next month, by the way!
Wunderbar1 asks, "What did they bring to Sparc?"
A common SPARC platform for single threaded performance or multi-threaded performance (as Larry promised) - definable at the VM level.
2x single-threaded performance in Maximum Throughput mode. 5x single-threaded performance in Maximum Instructions per Cycle (IPC) mode. Oracle VM for SPARC is great technology.
Oracle VM for SPARC is a $0 cost item. Virtualizing SPARC in a data center is completely free, including the management suite. The same [free] virtualization management suite handles Solaris, Linux, and Windows under Oracle VM for Intel, by the way.
http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2011/12/sparc-t4-optimizing-with-oracle-vm.html
In 2012, SPARC T5 brings common SPARC architecture with double the cores-per-socket and double the sockets per system. It is possible that this will be possible in the same chassis - there are rumors that we may be able to insert T5 boards into the T4-4 chassis, next year. If not, the T4-4 is less expensive than buying a 4x T4-1's.
Wunderbar1 continues, "Out of order execution. It has been in Power for yeaaars as well as Xeon"
Crowing about OOE existing through years of slow socket & system performance, where those vendors needed to glue multiple chips onto the same carrier to even try to compete, is a losing argument.
OOE (Our-of-order Execution) does not a CPU make. This is a feature. Socket and System performance is an aggregate of features. Bummer that POWER and Xeon performed so poorly in socket-per-socket throughput comparison for so many years (even with OOE.)
It is great to see competitors like Intel finally competing with highly threaded designs without multi-chip modules (took Intel years to implement these features from the SPARC playbook.)
As of December 2011, a dual-socket SPARC T3 still reigns supreme (over n-socket competitors at any socket count) and POWER remains absent.
http://www.spec.org/cgi-bin/osgresults?conf=web2005&op=fetch&latest=Dec-2011&sort1=PEAK
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The T4 Launch was awesome!"
Sigh.... Look at the SPEC configurations for the TPC-H benchmark result. Oracle assembled a system that is similar to the SuperCluster, but it is not the SuperCluster. Instead of using the ZFS storage appliance, this benchmark uses F5100 flash arrays to store the database completely on solid state drives! Basically, they proved that solid state has higher IO rates than disk.
In addition, Oracle didn’t just use twice as many processor cores for this benchmark. They also used substantially more server memory, additional 8x storage processors, more storage memory, more hard disk drives, and solid state drives (as compared to zero SSD in the IBM config). And they disabled integrity checking to boost performance. Would you do that in a production system?
In addition, T4 has fewer RAS features. No chipkill, no memory mirror/RAID, no capping, limited partition mobility on the fly, etc. Power is in a different class from a RAS perspective.
It is all smoke and mirrors.
"When I spoke to the salespeople this month, I told them the T4 was just what we have been waiting for. They told me that other customers have been expressing the same sentiment and they agree the T4 has been what they have been waiting for. "
- What else are they going to say? That, as reflected by their financials and Gartner/IDC, customers have been migrating off of Sparc in droves for years?
"Oracle VM for SPARC is a $0 cost item."
The *license* is free, but you have to pay for support which is costly.
"In 2012, SPARC T5 brings common SPARC architecture with double the cores-per-socket and double the sockets per system. It is possible that this will be possible in the same chassis"
That doesn't really matter. HP's Project Moonshot (ARM based servers) will bring 1000s weak of sockets and cores to a 4U server. Increasing the cores and sockets is what Sun needs to do to compete with the Power, and to a lesser extent Xeon, chips that are running at 2-3x their speed with improved threading.
This explains it: http://www.romuloaraujo.com/2011/10/oracle-t4-vs-ibm-power7.html
I understand why people like Sun (no idea why people like HP-UX). Solaris is a solid operating system. ZFS is a great file system. Sparc is just not up to snuff. I respected legacy Sun because they were honest, innovative, and genuinely nice people to work with in the past. It is a shame they had to be acquired.
I thought that Allison would beat out Matt for the most self-righteous commentard of the year award, but Wunderbar1 has come on strong toward the end. At least, to my knowledge, Allison and Matt don't have discussions with themselves... Wunderbar1 likes to congratulate himself on his cleverness through AC cover. Downright silly if you ask me.
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