* Posts by Allison Park

281 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jan 2010

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Sparc M4 chips etched by Oracle, not Fujitsu

Allison Park

there are no secrets in IT

IBM has been showing me this chart for awhile. The chart was created by an ex-sun M9000 technical sales person so you can count on it being accurate. Just because a chart says 1-64 sockets does not mean it will ever have 64 sockets or that the 8, 16, 32 sockets will come out within 12 months of the chip. Just ask HP about their 64 socket superdome2 or the year it took to make the 32 available although they claimed two 16 socket boxes next to each other with a single mgmt console somehow should qualify. Fujitsu is out of the SPARC business except for that exotic chip the government paid they to create.

Off to Jamaica for the break

Doomsday 2012 mega volcano 'unlikely' - NASA

Allison Park

No

The Yellowstone hotspot is just like Hawaii. The lava is slick and will not explode

Oracle dubs Solaris 11 world's 'first cloud OS'

Allison Park

They are smoking something only legal in some states

The M3 is the SPARC64 VII+ the roadmap is right here

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/computing/server/sparcenterprise/technology/protection/roadmap.html

The question is what is M4? 1.5X the single threaded performance well they could do that by greatly increasing the clock, wattage and heat like they did with the t4 (cool threads are gone).

Larry is not one for energy savings, after all how many houses does someone really need.

6X the throughput would require them to go from 4 to 16 cores and with the 1.5 thread improvement.

Is Fujitsu going to be able to have a 16 core chip with 1.5X the per thread performance or 8 core chip with 4 threads and 1.5X per thread.

Or do you think Oracle is just putting a T3 chip into the M systems from Fujitsu and customers will have to pay millions for Oracle software on all those cores?

Just remember that the Power7 has 8X the current SPARC64VII+ so by the time "M4" comes out after 7+ I am guessing it will still be a dog which needs oracle core factor discounts to compete.

NO THANKS!

Fujitsu readies 23 petaflops Sparc FX10 super beast

Allison Park
Happy

I still think they are right

SPARC wont die...just SPARC64

I don't think anyone see's Larry not being Larry. Why would he change now.

Virtualization market faces shake-up

Allison Park
Meh

Playing catch-up?

Isn't everyone still playing catch-up to z/vm? The closest seems to be PowerVM, but hat's off to VMware which has made the biggest dent in solving the proliferation of "cheap" intel boxes.

WikiLeaks on verge of financial collapse, founder says

Allison Park
FAIL

he is scum

He should be in jail for his hurtful actions

IBM big iron OSes treated to spit and polish

Allison Park

Not everyone has 8 cores per chip

SPARC64 is still at 4 along with Tukwila.

No wonder sparc and itanium continue marketshare and revenue every quarter/

The T4 came back to 8 cores to try to compete with core performance.

Allison Park

essay of nothing

That is a lot of worda to avoid admitting that Oracle/Sun keeps claiming 16,348 thread support for Solaris yet the most threads on any hardware that supports solaris is 512 which is half of what AIX can do. And, all I heard this month at OOW was how Oracle finally has single thread performance but only on the four socket box.

You bore us with your essays and we are not naive about oracle marketing

Allison Park
FAIL

at least its possible

Oracle/Sun keeps claiming 14K thread support for Solaris and how it makes it a generation ahead of every other O/S.

The problem is the most threads on any hardware that supports solaris is 512 which is half of what AIX can do. And who is going to buy a 795 with 256 cores and only run one operating systems on it?

People who live in glass houses should not throw rocks, and should read the actual claim from IBM which was about their blade attachment not just the mainframe.

Pure Kebob again

IBM preps boost for Power Systems

Allison Park
Thumb Up

awesome

Thanks for the quick summary, you can never get those from IBM announcements its either press releases that make you blurry eyed or 170 page powerpoints.

IBM nabs Platform for cloud control freakery

Allison Park

HP over paid

Everyone knows HP over paid...just look at all the Ellison/Hurd press about the deal.

HP paid $5M per employee for Autonomy, I am guessing just a few of them had stock/options and are spending a good part of their day picking out their vacation home in Croatia.

Platform looks like one of those companies that has a great product just not enough people selling it making it the perfect opportunity.

Oracle's Sparc T4 prices mask improved value

Allison Park
Angel

So much for cool threads the heat is cranked on these....

T4 is twice the software price. Given our software stack of EE, partitioning, compression, security., etc The price of software dwarfs the hardware price. In looking over the charts Sun sent over I see the roadmap says: 1X which means same performance per box as T3 and

5X single strand which means if only one app is running with only one thread you will get 5X the performance. Cheers to Oracle for coming out with new boxes, but the T has never had good value for Oracle software and the 2X price increase means they have no desire to improve the price performance. We will keep focused on virtualization.

Oracle previews Solaris 11, due in November

Allison Park
FAIL

You just don't get it

So Solaris can address more threads than AIX but it runs on hardware that has half the threads as AIX? wow....so Solaris is great, the hardware sucks and if Solaris ran on Power it could actually use as many threads as AIX.

.....Either you think people are stupid or you are so full of Sun Koolaide you didn't notice they went out of business and sold themselves at a firesale price which was less than Java alone was worth. Google is going to end up paying for the Sun purchase.

Allison Park
Happy

Veritas

Its because they are a veritas shop just like we are. 64K snapshots ....hmm that sounds like fun.

OPENSSL? still binary compatible?

The trip back from San Fran was horrible, they really should not let hungover people onto plans.

Allison Park
WTF?

IBM supports what the hardware does

Not sure why IBM would say they support 16K threads when the 795 has 1,024 simultaneous threads.

Last time I looked Sun only had M9000 64 procs * 4 cores * 2 = 512 threads

Sun T4 = 4 procs * 8 cores * 1 "simultaneous thread" = 32 threads

Ok yes the chip may only run one thread at a time but it can move 8 threads in and out over time

so while it is a stretch you could say 4*8*8 = 256

So how is Solaris a generation ahead? Oh that's right you think customers can't do 2nd grade math.

What I heard from my Sun buddy was Solaris 11 requires ZFS so they will not be using it any time soon and the OpenSSL has changed so they will need to look through all their code.

The admin is totally different also but that does not affect binary, just a huge expense which is making them look at AIX and Linux as the alternative.

Allison Park
FAIL

Solaris 11 is a rewrite and will break binary compatibility

But expect a guarantee that will say Oracle will help you fix it over the phone from India so they can still provide a guarantee

IBM woos Oracle punters smarting from price hikes

Allison Park
Go

Moving to DB2

We have plans to move our SAP environment to DB2. The licenses we free up there will help avoid buying any more Oracle.

Ellison: 'There'll be nothing left of IBM once I'm done'

Allison Park
FAIL

Get out much?

"In all my travels around the world, I have never seen AIX nor POWER." Looks like you have missed the boat. IBM keeps showing me these market share numbers that shows AIX and Power are now over 50% of the Unix market

"Do you what these" Hopefully, English is not your first language.

Shouldn't you be at OOW with the rest of us?

Allison Park
IT Angle

now we know why

now we know why you have a hard on for IBM.

Be it unsubstantiated claims with little regard for the facts it does make for interesting reading.

I would have thought that inventing RISC would be more than "make it simple and it will go fast", but I dont have time to troll the patent database.

Try to come up with articles from the last 3 years not 10 please

Allison Park

By clear admission of denial you admit it

You obviously have Ellison Envy....

Allison Park
FAIL

You have Ellison Envy

That's worse then Penis Envy.

The difference between God and Larry Ellison? God doesn't think he is Larry.

When Ellison goes, will he go gracefully?

Allison Park
Angel

He won't go out liike Steve Jobs

People will not be comparing him to Ford, Edison, Einstein,....

The media will mention it but not spend all day interviewing people about his impact.

He should listen to Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford address and go do something meaningful with his life.

Sad to see Steve go.

.

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is dead at 56

Allison Park
Pint

celebrate his life

He will be missed. Hopefully Apple will find another visionary to continue their ability to change our lives for the better.

Oracle revs up Sparc, speeds up roadmap

Allison Park
Happy

Interesting changes

In July Oracle posted an updated roadmap which had the next M-Series moving to 2013 the last M-series moving to 2014 and the combined SPARC moving to 2015. I wonder how they got them to all move back in. I think I read somewhere that Oracle's roadmap is now on their fiscal year vs. calendar which gives them 4 more months in a year.

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc-enterprise/public-sparc-roadmap-421264.pdf

Now in September they redid the roadmap to blur the years. What i have heard is the next M-series was supposed to be a scalable variant of the T4 but Oracle won't be able to get the T scaling beyond 4 sockets any time soon so they convinced Fujitsu to do another fab of SPARC64. I would say I was wrong that SPARC64 is at end of life...but that was their plan.

I haven't heard if the next chip will be on a new fab or still on the current 65nm. They sold their Fab to toshiba so not sure how that would work out.

It looks like they are still targeting the last M-series to be a T chip and the new one below is just the 4 socket version.

Looks like they are buying time till 2014 and hoping the continual decline in SPARC levels off.

It is good to see competition in the market.

Keep in mind that "In test" does not mean something is coming out soon. The ROCK chip was canceled in June 2009 but was in test in early 2007.. Apr 11, 2007 – Jonathan Schwartz has posted on his Sun blog that the Rock (the codename for Sun's upcoming processor) has arrived at his desk. Been there done that.

Well off to cancun.

Oracle accuses Autonomy chief of telling 'whopper'

Allison Park
FAIL

So much for the Oracle HP feud being over

I thought the firing of Leo would have left some air out of that balloon

Oracle rises for Unix server push

Allison Park
Thumb Up

Kebabbert - you are paranoid

I have no reason to post anonymously.

As far as your questions. I don't need to bother. But Larry is the first person to say he will get out of the x86 server business so what does that mean for exa-crap? Another exadata-1 killing as they move to oem dell or intel directly?

We have x86 and power. The main differentiation is reliability and TCO not a some single cluster vs. SMP benchmark.

Power still commands a pretty high margin and if you count their software stack with db2, websphere, tivoli they probably make $4 for every $1 of hardware. I am sure Oracle enjoys the success of Power also in the market with their insane pricing.

Would be interesting to hear your answers to your own questions in regards to SPARC vs. Intel x86.

And I am not sure what country you live in but I am a she not a he.

Allison Park
Happy

Meg please take Larry out to dinner

Matt...thanks for the compare.

With last years 2x price per core for 13% more performance of Tukwila (compare HP's TPC-H benchmarks) and this years list of product releases that will not be on Itanium it looks like most HP customers have also given up on Itanium. I have yet met one that is looking to go to the Snorcle kit to reward Leisure suit Larry.

Maybe Meg can sweet talk Larry

Allison Park
Mushroom

Oracle marketing is the slippery one

Kebabbert...my point is that Oracle keeps making these big 3x/5x/8x claims but no real facts behind them.

Thanks for posting that 2003 article again and pretending it is relevant to todays market.

Here is the quote from the article that you hope people don't read. I would say you are between a rock and a hard spot but larry killed your rock. :-x

Bowen, the executive in charge of AIX, emphasised that IBM's Unix isn't being replaced by Linux on any product plans. "We've got people now who are building chips for 2007 systems. If we had any belief that AIX was going to fall down and stumble, we wouldn't be doing that," Bowen said. In particular, a major revamp of AIX is due in early 2004. And though Bowen wouldn't provide specifics, he said the AIX development team is somewhere between two and four times as large as the 250 people IBM employs to improve Linux at its Linux Technology Center.

as always nice watching you write an epic fail

Allison Park
Megaphone

T-class is dead to any new workloads

I cannot see anyone buying a T system that does not already have one and is not ready to migrate.

This announcement was pretty lame compared to Westmere and Power7

3.0GHz with OOO execution (Oracle is acting like out of order execution is a great new technology)

The T chips are about the only chips that don't have it. Even the old USIII's had it

Dedicated L2 128KB cache - wow that is almost big

Shared 4MB L3 cache - 4MB/8 cores has anybody done the math on Westmere or Power7 they should be ashamed of trying to be proud of this

8 cores with Private L2 Cache - lets repeat the prior statement to make it look important and just dumped down from 16 cores

"up to 5X the single threaded performance" I am guessing that is compared to T1? T2? can't possibly be compared vs. Xeon or Power cause I am betting it is 1/5th

The sparc Supercluster idea is pure marketing BS Peoplesoft and JD Edwards performance improved up to 8X? I didn't even think anyone had JDE on SPARC. I thought they killed that before Oracle bought Sun.

<1% virtualization overhead. Well when you pin the partitions to threads which are only on one CPU then yes there wont be much overhead, but then again there will not be much virtualization

Basically a smaller T chip (8 vs. 16 cores) and better threading with out of order and trying to re-announce the sparc version of Exa-crap cause no one would ever spend $20M for a sparc version

Thanks but we will stick with x86 and power for our infrastructure, pity the fools who have not seen the light and still buy this crap.

The only thing interesting is Oracle is finally bringing virtualization to the exadata solutions after almost 3 years...they really need to get a solution that can compete with vmware and powervm

XXOOXX

Ellison rides SPARC T4 SuperCluster into data centers

Allison Park
Angel

Expensive...yes....unless you are Larry

Here is our standard Oracle database load...and why we are not interested in Larry's scale out strategy. If and when we do RAC it is only 3 notes. We cannot afford to have four nodes with the performance of 3 and all the software costs.

shop.oracle.com

Look at this pricing SPARC T4-4 compute nodes = 4systems*4processors*8cores*.5 core factor table = 64 licenses required.

Oracle EE $47,500

Oracle RAC $23,000

Oracle Dataguard $10,000

Oracle Database Vault $23,000

Oracle Advanced Security $11,500

Oracle Advanced compression $11,500

Oracle Partitioning $11,500

Grand total is $10.7Million with only one year of support

If you add in the software costs of those exadata servers and I think $10K per harddrive you will see this is insane and why Larry likes to only compare against the most expensive enterprise system from IBM with his 4 socket boxes.

Thanks but we prefer the buy IBM Power and virtualize it as much as possible to avoid buying more Oracle software licenses.

Oracle defies the economy – and the curse of Sun

Allison Park
WTF?

Parrell vs. single SMP

Kebabbert....don't insult our intelligence

Of course Larry's future is clusters not simple scale up. He makes about 3X the money adding on RAC and all the performance monitoring tools to make it work.

Comparing a cluster of 6 sun (cough) intel servers with the reliability of about 5 years with a mission critical enterprise server is not a fair compare.

Obviously Oracle needed to do a benchmark without a price comparison cause those 480 cores with all that Oracle clustering software and management tools would be insane.

Yet another example of Oracle finding a benchmark where there have only been 1 result in the last 3 years and trying to claim leadership, then comparing to leadership

Looks like they didn't want to compare the 4 node cluster with 40,000 users (about 10,000 users on each node) to the single node IBM Power7 at 15,600 users (almost 2 year old benchmark).

Oracle chose a very old (2008 non-unicode) prior generation benchmark to compare.

First rules of benchmarketing....the marketing department is in charge.

Allison Park
Megaphone

100 customers per quarter

Considering how many loyal Sun customers there were 100 new exadata OR exalogic customers per quarter two years after announce is pretty lame.

I have seen Oracle be pretty cagey about the numbers but how much of their hardware revenue is exa-crap?

Everyone I talk to wont get near an m-class since it is 5 year old technology with no future SPARC64 technology.

As far as the T4 which seems to be the only future for SPARC I saw Oracle just doubled the price even though customers will be lucky to get 2x the performance per core. Just before we dumped Sun technology off the standards list we tested the virtualization on T and found the threads to be tied to closely to the cores which made it no better than the ldom technology of the prior generations.

Hat's off to Oracle for driving our Sun costs and reaping software dollars, but I still see a rapid retreat of Sun customers from Oracle hardware and especially the lock in of exa-money systems.

Cheers, Allison

Sparc T4 chips: Oracle makes stealthy spec change

Allison Park
FAIL

Thanks but our IQ is higher than yours

What did you forget to provide the links to some 8 year old article that predated IBM going to over 50% of the Unix market share?

This is a quote from the article and if you look what has happened to IBM AIX and Power systems you will see they were right. They are investing in AIX because it is a growth platform. Oracle is treating Sun customers as cash cows.

"Bowen, the executive in charge of AIX, emphasised that IBM's Unix isn't being replaced by Linux on any product plans. "We've got people now who are building chips for 2007 systems. If we had any belief that AIX was going to fall down and stumble, we wouldn't be doing that," Bowen said. In particular, a major revamp of AIX is due in early 2004. And though Bowen wouldn't provide specifics, he said the AIX development team is somewhere between two and four times as large as the 250 people IBM employs to improve Linux at its Linux Technology Center"

We will continue to buy IBM as Oracle is going after Sun customers money and abandoning HP customers with strong arm tactics. We are also moving our BI infrastructure to DB2 and if that goes well we will look at our SAP then OLTP work loads.

IBM opens Power8 kimono (a little bit more)

Allison Park
Angel

FACTS

The "M-Class" servers in 2012 and 2014 will have Oracle T based chips in them. They will not be Fujitsu chips. Hence the statement that SPARC64 is on its last chip. Never said SPARC is dead. Oracle raised the maintenance costs which are generating a ton of profit so they will let this cash cow die slowly. Oracle is not stupid like HP and announce they will kill something at an earning announcement then charge $99 for something that costs $400 to make.

Ask Oracle who's chips will be in those boxes. They will be a forklift upgrade from the current M boxes and will have T chips in them. I highly doubt Oracle will be able to create a T based server that goes beyond 8 sockets but that would be speculation.

To reference a statement from over five years ago which is also refuted in the same article and does not match reality today is being a FUDster, but then again I am guessing you were not burned by Sun's hardware mistakes in the past.

Cheers

Allison Park

faster intel chips

Intel is focused on adding more cores to become "faster". They do not care about core factor tables or PVU pricing and the true cost of ownership. Their focus on adding cores vs. more powerful cores will keep them out of the mission critical space.

Allison Park
Megaphone

Early, on time, late, dead

I thought Power7 was early by a quarter and if you look at the roadmap from year 2000 on IBM has hit the 3 year new generation on time with p4>p5>p6>p7

Not sure where they get accused of being late. The Snorcle fan above is throwing rocks at the wrong house. Or should I say they dont have a rock to throw. SPANCV was cancelled which was the beginning of the end. SPARC64 will not have any future chips.

So the big question is can Oracle keep the T chip going and put it in a scalable system beyond 4 sockets. Their large SMP's before were made by Cray and they had a hard time getting the switch from 66mhz>100mhz>150mhz and finally gave up for Fujitsu technology. I don't think they have the skill to develop a competitive switch like IBM has with Power or even their x5 architecture in their x86 line. Look at how long it took HP to finally get back into the 8 socket space with xeon.

Cheers Allison

HP's UK PC boss: We're going nowhere

Allison Park

Nice hardware...poor software

Ok so I got the $100 touchpad, who could pass up a deal like that even if I only use it for surfing, reading and angry birds. Problem is the Kindle app is beta and I can't sideload any of my books.

No wonder its only $100....I would be freaking out if I paid the original price and undoubtedly taking it back.

Samsung refuses to buy HP's PC business

Allison Park

Then why so eager to dump it?

They have priced the unit at $10B so hard to say they are not shopping it around. I still cannot believe they are going to spend $10B for the UK company which translates to $5M per employee.

MB....Not sure if you saw this yet...but you can't say there are no details on 7+ or 8

http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh082211-story01.html

Cheers

Poulson Itaniums hit 'Replay' for reliability

Allison Park

At least I use facts

oh btw...i do want to get one of those HP touchpads at $99 you cant beat the price. Leo is the boss.

Allison Park

Will HP and Intel ever fix the QPI design?

HP's four wide blade has 8 processors and each chip only has 5 QPI's which means you have direct connectivity to 5 of the other 7 chips. For the remaining two chips you have to ask the other intaniums to talk to the other guys.

HP's Superdome has SX3000 glue chips which only use two of the QPI's (three if you count the connection to the redundant glue chip) so two QPI's are wasted.

You would think that HP and Intel would either have 3QPI's or 8 but not 5.

From what I am hearing that since Poulson and Kittson are "socket compatible" it will never be fixed and things don't look good for anything past Kittson which does not look that good either.

Allison Park
Stop

HP? HP who? Intel says

Looks like HP will move to #4 on Intel's volume discount list and Intel's desire to keep making Itanium will go on the would be nice to do list but wont get around to it and cant afford it.

Oracle's Sparc T4 chip: Will you pay Larry's premium?

Allison Park
FAIL

Oracle/Sun does not have a glue chip

IBM and HP have special chips to create those 8 socket boxes. Oracle does not have the technology to create a real 8 socket box.

Oracle's 8 socket intel box has to use the intel chips as gateways from chips 2 to 8. That is what happens when a chip only has 4 QPI links. One goes to I/O and the other three go to 3 of the remaining chips of 7 that the chip needs talk to.

IBM is x5, HP is XNC, Oracle is "sorry we dont have one"

Which is also why if you buy the Exadata X2-8 you are admitting you will spend millions on bad technology.

Hardware-happy HP has swallowed a Sun death pill

Allison Park

Ditch Itanium?

No....HP is looking forward to paying higher prices for Intel chips since they will spin off the business that gets them the best prices in the industry because of volume.

Look around all the middleware companies have been bought and HP is left out in the cold.

Unreal watching them make bad move after bad move. Thinking about picking up a touchpad for $99....sure its dead but for that price might be a good web browser for the beach house.

IBM yanks chain on 'Blue Waters' super

Allison Park
FAIL

SPARC? are you serious?

The Xeon E7 is up to 160% more performance and 50% of the cost of a T5440 and up to 600% of the performance at 50% of the cost of an M4000.

How many SPARC boxes are in the Top 500? I dont have the time to look but i bet single digit if not zero. (You cant count the Japanese VIIIfx cluster because that chip will never be a commercial offering as all future SPARC64 chips have been cancelled)

HP board gives Leo $10bn more funny money

Allison Park

2 Suns

With the cash at Sun it only cost 5B. Was it HP that said no to Larry about taking the hardware business? Is Mark a genius or stupid lucky?

Oracle bestows Sparc T4 beta on 'select' customers

Allison Park

Fujitsu SPARC64 roadmap

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/computing/server/sparcenterprise/technology/protection/roadmap.html

There are no future SPARC64 chips. No 45nm, No DDR3, No Octocore, No future.

It is at its "end of life"

Interesting that the url is the same as before but Fujitsu changed the title to say history.

Allison Park
Megaphone

is the T4 still going to be only 4 sockets?

I have seen SPARC64 is end of life and the new m-class will be T chips, but the real question is can Oracle make the T chips get past 4 sockets? Everything in their roadmaps assumes they will be able to scale to 32 sockets where so far they have only been able to get to 4 and most of their systems engineers have left.

I will have to consult the great Oracle

Allison Park
Meh

I don't trust Oracle's hardware commitment

Hardware is a tough business. Just look at how many hardware companies have gone out of business. Given Sun's lack of investment and bad investments over the years there is no way Oracle can reverse the problem in under 3-5 years. There is a business for existing customers and it does look like Oracle is at least investing in trying to keep them. Unfortunately, the price increases on maintenance, Oracle only maintenance, lack of support for UltraSPARC, end of SPARC64 and breaking their binary compatibility we wont even talk to Oracle about hardware.

IBM profits hum along nicely in second quarter

Allison Park
IT Angle

IBM to $200?

I would have never thought IBM stock would get to $200, but then again Apple is also doing everything right while Microsoft can't do anything right. Something has to be said about companies that come back from failure and find the right course for the future.

I think HP has not hit bottom yet. They will come back sometime but everything they have done in the last few years has only been about cutting costs and their products are falling behind.

Oracle is the big unknow. If they still only had software there would be nothing stopping them. Their focus on profit from the Sun purchase has served them will but everyone in the business I talk to has Oracle as the next CA. Someone should do a survey of IT vendors like vs. hate. Everyone seems to have doubled their hate of Oracle in the last year.

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