Gone in a flash: Oracle lays off hundreds as the biz formerly known as Pillar Data is shuttered

Oracle is shuttering its flash storage division and laying off at least 300 employees, according to various sources. Employees were told of the mass redundancies on 15 August by Mike Workman, senior veep of Storage at Oracle via a conference call. A middle ranking outgoing staffer at Oracle, told The Reg last night: "Today, …

[TVU]

Gone in a flash: Oracle lays off hundreds

A spokeswoman at Oracle sent us a statement:

"As our cloud business grows, we will continually balance our resources and restructure our development group to help ensure we have the right people delivering the best cloud products to our customers around the world. We will also continue to give our sacked employees no advance notice whatsoever and we will continue to try to give them the minimum possible severance terms. If you are unlucky enough to remain as one of our employees, we undertake to continue to try to discriminate against you and force you out of a job too".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Gone in a flash: Oracle lays off hundreds

Each of those 12 employees need to do the work of 33 others. Good thing they've been classified as management so they can work 25 hours per day without additional compensation.

[A.P. Veening]

Re: Gone in a flash: Oracle lays off hundreds

True, but no actual work will be done, let the blame game begin.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Gone in a flash: Oracle lays off hundreds

But no-one uses oracle cloud. They all use exadata. This is madness.

[Anonymous Coward]

close call!

I had a job offer to join that team last summer but the job requisition was never signed off by senior HR after weeks of waiting it was withdrawn.

NEVER RESIGN FROM A JOB UNTIL YOU GET A SIGNED OFFER AND START DATE!

.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: close call!

Recently I had a signed contract in my hands from a medium sized company that was withdrawn at the last minute due to internal company issues. Possibly an illegal action on their part but I didn't have the money to find out in court and I had another offer elsewhere anyway, The point however is that even a signed contract is no guarantee that you'll become an employee until you're actually sitting at the desk and have the id card.

[Mpeler]

Larry, Larry, Quite Contrary

Larry, Larry, quite contrary,

How does your empire grow?

With IP "rights" and patent fights,

And lawyers all in a row....

[Anonymous Coward]

FS1 road for disaster

I am an ex-Oracle storage sales, we were waiting long for the FS1 to be released with high anticipation. Once it was publicly announced our sales strategy was to pitch this before their other hybrid NAS storage array the ZFS (which is mainly sold as a backup appliance to Oracle's Exadata customers). Although the block-based FS1 had good performance, it was lacking many features that other 'ground-up designed' flash arrays had. I think it was on the market for just 1 or 1,5 years before it was already taken off our price list. The customer who were brave enough to invest in it were pushed to buy their expansions quickly before stock ran out.

The Pillar organization is now downgraded, in the near future the same will happen with the remaining ZFS engineering team, which is also put on a 'keeping the lights on' development program without releasing major new features. Same is unfortunately happening with the StorageTek (tape) range of products, with it's last major feat not to release their T10000E enterprise tape drive once LTO8 caught up with StorageTek technology advantage...

Protecting customer's Exadata workload with ZFS or ZDLRA is a way to go when you want to make yourself completely dependent on an organization like Oracle.....However although Oracle claims specific performance with Hybrid Columnar Compression or other advanced database-code knowledge leading to better performance/TCO, there are solutions on the market with at least the same performance and verification features and a much better compression and restore rate than the outdated ZFS. Have a look at Data Domain with native RMAN integration and management by the DBA team through their own OEM console ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: FS1 road for disaster

[anon] "other hybrid NAS storage array the ZFS (which is mainly sold as a backup appliance to Oracle's Exadata customers)"

Ummm... no. ZFS is at the core of various engineered systems, to supply boot disks for the various physical & virtual chassis and storage for data not stored on proprietary Exadata Storage Cells.

[anon] "same performance and verification features and a much better compression and restore rate than the outdated ZFS."

Ummm... no ZFS provides checksum & correction from the memory on the chassis through all data connections on the motherboard through any medium used to communicate to media providing storage, down to the error corrected bit being presented by the media on the storage components.

New data compression algorithm had been plugged in after ZFS was first released and new features are continually being added, under multiple platforms (Solaris, Illumos, Linux, BSD, etc.), with a thriving ecosystem where multiple OS & Cloud vendors are all choosing to adopt & contribute.

[anon] "an ex-Oracle storage sales"

That is why you are en "ex-Oracle storage sales" drone.

[Rainer]

Re: FS1 road for disaster

The problem with ZFS is that it is not "distributed".

That said, I'm still not sure if Ceph's erasure coding is equally reliable as ZFS's end-to-end integrity protection.

[WERDE]

Re: FS1 road for disaster

Interestingly, a lot of Ceph deployments use ZFS for the filesystem on their nodes. Perhaps for that very reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey!!

_I_ was taken round the back, once...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hey!!

"_I_ was taken round the back, once..."

Fnar Fnar !!! :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Worked for them briefly

I worked at Pillar very briefly many years ago, must have been around 2004 (jeez, has it really been 15 years???) and so glad I quit when I did and didn't waste more than a few months there. There's nothing they ever did, nor a product they ever announced, that made me regret leaving.

The only really notable thing I remember about Pillar was that they had a painting of Workman's Dachshund on the roof of the headquarters.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop moaning!

I don't know why they're moaning. They rode the bus to the end of the line and got the bag of cash. Spare a thought for the ones they didn't RIF - they're the walking dead. Go get a meaningful job somewhere - you'll actually like it on the outside.