* Posts by SplitBrain

84 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Sep 2010

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Fiat 500 TwinAir

SplitBrain
Pint

You are all missing the point here....

There is no IT angle, but there is an engineering angle, and we geeks love good engineering. Fact is this is the most radical departure in the way a petrol engine is built in decades, they really havn't changed all that much since the birth of the combustion engine.

I applaud FIAT for the multiair, it's a potent little engine.

Mine's the Alfa Giulietta 1.4 170hp :)

Sergey Brin: Only 20% of Googlers still on Windows

SplitBrain
Pint

Cygwin....

...Problem Solved.

IBM preps Power7+ server chip rev

SplitBrain

@PXG

"Even if AIX is UNIX with a registery :o)."

True, my only gripe with what is an otherwise fine OS, the ODM doesnt go wrong often and you can fix it on the go, but when you have to wrestle with several DB's which all contain the same shit just to clear out a bad software install then it gets very very tedious..

Give me my path_to_inst and flat files any day of the week.

Server vendors and the dead hand of commoditisation

SplitBrain
Pint

Sun Innovative....

Agreed, wholeheartedly.

Google drops Schmidt for Elop, Android for WinPho 7

SplitBrain
FAIL

Bit Crap Really...

Not a very good April fools attempt, at least make it a little believable!

Microsoft buy's Red Hat, now that would be a good (and scary) April fool.

Oracle's Itanium gambit: A play for HP's checkbook

SplitBrain

The EU could care less...

The EU probably doesn't give a feck, why would they when they are pretty much powerless to do anything?

SplitBrain
FAIL

Kebabbert - Stop!!

Will you please STOP will all the pointless benchmark quotes, it's all you ever bloody go on about your posts are utter drivel!

Seriously...are you even a sys admin?

Ellison drops iceberg in front of HP's unsinkable Itanic

SplitBrain
Headmaster

Easy for our DBA's

I'm not a DBA, but we have been doing exactly that for a couple of years, moving multi terabyte DB's from Solaris and AIX to Red Hat and from AIX to Solaris, hell our DBA's even moved an Oracle DB from Windows to Solaris.

All you do is install binaries on target, shut down the DB, run a DB export and then import on your new target box. Any half decent DBA can do it, technically it;s not difficult at all.

Time for data transfer can be an issue, but if you are moving to another box in the same Datacentre on the same fabric then the storage can just be mapped/masked to the target box, that way no waiting for the network transfers, it's all there instantly....

Easy if you know how...

SplitBrain

Didn't I suggest that in another post

I'm pretty sure I suggested HP buy SAP/Sybase at some point in some other thread a while back. I seem to recall you dismissing it back then, change of tune eh Matt?...

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2010/12/07/oracle_pricing_changes/

You also ridiculed DB2 plenty, yet here you are saying it is a viable alternative..

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/01/19/hp_microsoft_frontline_appliances/

You contradict youself time and time again....

SplitBrain
FAIL

Kiralexi - Wrong way round..

No one care's about what OS is running, that's the whole point here!!!

App's rule the roost, what hardware and OS is driving them is irrelevent. Oracle customers will switch OS/hardware far, far faster than they switch database.....Larry knows this, hence him playing this card.

I work for one of the biggest yank banks going, the Oracle DB is not going anywhere (even our Sybase is phasing out to be replaced by Oracle), whereas Solaris and AIX is going out of the door for the low end DB's and middleware to be replaced by Red Hat.

Our M9000's running our biggest DB's will eventually be replaced....by another big SPARC box, why? Intel cannot scale x86 that big. The day it does is the day we will buy it. What chance POWER did have to replace the big M-series box's is now dead, as Oracle will simply price their hardware lower than (the admittedly better) P-Series to keep us on SPARC, and they will be doing this for every account going.

SplitBrain
Grenade

SP&L or whatever....

Well well, Larry it taking his love of the art of war a bit seriously isn't he!!

Matt B - I'd love to hear your explanation for this one...

I love it though, how often do you see naked aggression of this kind in the enterprise market? Never. Like I said before, Itanium was dead when Red Hat and MS dropped support, now that the dominant DB vendor has also dropped it, HP-PHUX is finished...no if's and no buts.

Oracle is essentially abusing it's monopoly position in the DB market, it wants to dominate the high end, high margin space, where it's only remaining competition is now IBM. I suspect Oracle will alter AIX pricing again to favour Solaris, and push as many people towards SPARC as possible.

It's downright nasty, no doubt about that, but that's business and Larry is bloody good at it...

IBM: Our appliance servers smoke Ellison's 'phony baloney'

SplitBrain
Stop

Give it a rest......

You don't half go on and on, all you talk about is bloody benchmarks!

I'm a proper "Sunshiner" and you even do my bloody head in!

SplitBrain
Boffin

Happens a bit with AIX

We have a very very slow memory leak where network memory buffers do not get released, takes around 9 months to hit the "wall" which is the limit before AIX stops allowing mbufs to be allocated. a 6.1 TL4 upgrade fix's it but upgrading isn't easy to do until the app stack is tested with it. We are running Veritas Global Cluster and my guess is it is either the local heartbeats or the remote heartbeat to the remote cluster. Are you running HACMP?

AIX has always been more prone to memory leaks than Solaris in my opinion.

Oracle accused of stifling HP TPC benchmark

SplitBrain
Megaphone

Silly really....

All the G7's are blinding server's, as are the IBM X5's, key point here, it's intel pushing forward and innovating with their CPU's, HP and IBM are just packaging it.

The current 7500's cannot scale past 8 sockets in a glueless config, so if your workload will run on 8 sockets that fine, you get extremely good value for money, if you need more than that then you have no choice but to go for big Iron, P*95 or superdome, just so happens the Sparc Super duper cluster thingy me bobby happens to be the quickest at the moment. Either that or workload permitting you can buy a load of x86 tin and use RAC to save some dough.

Chalk and cheese....

Oracle and Fujitsu hook up on Sparc servers

SplitBrain
WTF?

You call that a sense of humour? Seriously?

"Apologies if you mistake humour for aggression"

Right barrel of laughs you are, I'm sure everyone agrees. A bit sadistic like Frankie Boyle, only minus the funny bits...

".....I hope to god I never have to meet you..." If you really do "bounce around the city" then you probably already have. I've enjoyed many years of baiting Sunshiners in the UK, many parts of Continental Europe, and even as far afield as the States.

Woop-de fecking do, don't you work for some company called Ingram? In the shitehole of a place called Reading? I only do the City contract's you see, have been for 7 years, and will continue to cream the "Slowaris" money (Red Hat too these days) banks dish out for years to come. Never met you, likely never will.

"I would suggest you learn Linux - fast!"

And what makes you think I'm not already a Dab hand with Red Hat, and the various Debian's going back years? I know Solaris better than most, my Red Hat and AIX is as good as most, my HP-PHUX is non existent, wanna know why? In the banking sector, no one fecking use's it, that's why....

SplitBrain
WTF?

Matt B.....

Dude you have a problem....seriously, why so aggressive all the time? I really do think you need a visit to the doc's mate, that obsession you have with slagging off anything and anyone that isn't HP is not normal and cannot be healthy.

I bounce around the city a fair bit on contracts, the Unix world is a fairly small one, with all honesty, I hope to god I never have to meet you...

SplitBrain

@Jesper - Fujitsu is not being partnered for nothing.....

It may well be CMT based, then again it may be SPARC 64 based. One thing is for sure is that some of that technology from Venus will be there in some form, if it wasn't, then why would Oracle bother with the tie up with Fujitsu? Fujitsu has to bring something to the table and the only thing they got is the Venus CPU architecture. I'm not saying it will be that exact Venus chip, but some of that tech will wind up in the future chip, Oracle ain't about to partner (hence share profits....) unless Fujitsu is pulling it's weight....

SplitBrain

I thought as much....

I knew that venus chip would be commercialized in some form, Oracle and Fujitsu were not about to let the billion odd quid the Japanese government sank into the funding for the Venus development go to waste.....that would just be silly.

If that potential roadmap turns out to be true, I have no reason to doubt it (all that much anyway....) then Oracle/Sun hardware looks to have a decent future. I look forward to the dust up between IBM and Oracle, true to old Larry's word, he is giving it a good go. Here we have two companies with great products competing fiercely, this can only be good for us, the consumer.

With Solaris 11 in prod grade not too far off, some interesting hardware developments, and of course with that DB and all that middleware and all those app's I say Oracle looks in pretty good shape.

Of course, as it's a story about Oracle/Sun, we can expect the resident militant HP fan boy to come along and start spewing his usual delusions...

HP makes flash music with Violin

SplitBrain
FAIL

HP....Inventing...bugger all!

Typical, They go and make an appliance to compete with Exadata and look at how much of what goes into this appliance they actually own/manufacture.....

CPU's- Intel

OS - Red Hat more than likely

DB - ORACLE!!!!!

Flash Storage Array - Viola or whatever.

WIll this move in volumes if it is cheaper than exadata? Sure it will. Will add to revenue? Sure it will. Will it generate as much profit as exadata? no bloody chance....

To make any decent moolah, they need to own the entire stack, they own feck all apart from the cheap tin on this config.........makes me wonder why they bother with the thin margin they will make. To live up the the "Invent" slogan I gather.....

Unix dynamic duo awarded Japan Prize

SplitBrain
WTF?

RE- Unix

UNIX has not lost it's simplicity, perhaps it's just too complicated for you......

HP euthanizes Neoview data warehouse iron

SplitBrain
FAIL

HP and M$...says it all

Said it before, I'll say it again.

Any EVP or CIO that actually buys this carp must not know their ass from their elbow.

A Microsoft (cough..) appliance, for the mission critical back end? Are you Fecking kidding me?

Desperate HP, very very desperate.....

Microsoft and HP Frontline marriage births appliance iron

SplitBrain

@Channel Channel Channel

Who the hell care's? It's a bloody Micro$h!te box! Who in their right mind is going to buy a SQL Server box for warehousing??? Of course it will be ridiculously cheap, pays yer money and takes yer choice....may well be good enough for a small cheap shop who can afford all the downtime that will inevitably happen with a scaled out SQL *cough* cluster.

Personally, I'd go for something which is actually proven in the market, Oracle or DB2 namely.

Symantec launches scale-out NAS using Chinese hardware

SplitBrain

CFS? Puh-leeze.....

I have the pleasure of administering a good few Oracle RAC clusters using Storage Foundation for RAC, the vxfs Cluster FIlesystem is an unstable and hugely buggy filesystem at the best of times......couple it with a Chinese NAS box.....well, I wonder how many of these "appliances" they will sell..

Apotheker to shake things up at HP

SplitBrain
Stop

What? No Matt B?

Where art though??? It's a story about HP...are you not meant to be singing it's praise's? Seems Apotheker isn't!

Oracle defies HP and IBM with 47% revenue leap

SplitBrain
Alert

Itanium...meh

"Oracle is not allowing HP to publish benchmark results based on its eponymous database running atop HP-UX, HP's variant of Unix. Why HP has not put out results for a full-bore Superdome 2 machine running Microsoft's Windows and SQL Server combo might seem like a bit of a mystery, but Microsoft is backing off from supporting Itanium with future Windows stacks and HP doesn't want to bring that up."

Oracle strangling HP, even MS pulling itanium support! RHEL 6 with no itanium support, not looking good for the Superdome's is it.....

When you have the vendors of the worlds dominant operating systems pulling support for an architecture, it's done.....end of.

IBM tosses in freebie Linux with Power servers

SplitBrain
FAIL

IBM will says anything to get that sale

I buy a lot of Power kit and run AIX on it, linux does not get a look in, AIX and Power go together like SPARC/Solaris, it will always be more stable running the OS it was designed for rather than Linux. Most commentards here have no experience of running Red Hat on P-Series, I don't either, but we do run some Red Hat ("Z-Linux") on the Z-Series mainframes, and it is the most godawful, bug ridden unstable platform in our estate, makes windoze look stable! The constraints with using it on the mainframe are ridiculous, and the resource management/virtualization is terrible, one image can easily go and gobble up all cpu time and starve all other images, we see it ALL the time. IBM also had the nerve to say "Well linux on Z-Series is not very mature, so there will be issues", so why bloody sell it to us then? It's been available for 10 years, is that not mature enough?

Bottom line - IBM will pitch all kinds of bollocks to get a sale, Linux on Z-Series is unfit for purpose, I would bet it won't be any different on P-Series either. If anyone has any expereience of Red Hat on P-Series let me know....I don't think there is many of you out there and for good reason....

And with the nehalem bad boys from intel, why would you want to run linux on Power?? The extra oomph you get from Power is minimal now that x86 has come of age in the high end. The 20-30% increase in processing power you get from POWER does not make up for the 400% extra cost anyway, you might as well just throw hundreds of thousands down the drain...

IBM Power Systems deals get stingier

SplitBrain

Good Kit...expensive though

We have a good few hundred P Series (P5/P6) knocking around, mostly a Sun estate though. I do like IBM hardware, it's easily the best out there (coming from a "Sunshiner"). In terms of CPU development they have lead the pack for the last 7-8 years in my opinion and that is why they are where they are, they are also pretty much untouched in the RISC virtualization world too, VIO is damn impressive. AIX though....meh....no proper obp...meh...the ODM...the most stupid idea ever, give me my flat files and my path_to_inst any day. Hacking away at the ODM after a failed websphere install is bloody horrible.

Saying all that AIX is a perfectly capable and fine OS, just would't call it a great UNIX that's all, ain't no love for binary database's from me! It's something I have no issues with deploying though, and I reckon it would be deployed a hell of a lot more over the other *nix's if it was cheaper. In my opinion IBM has a vastly overinflated view of how much it's hardware is worth.....

McNealy to Ellison: How to duck death by open source

SplitBrain
WTF?

RE - Don Mitchell

"They desperately want an operating system with the stability of MS Server but without the complex and expensive licensing."

That, hands down, has got to be the funniest thing I have read on this site.....

SplitBrain

Golf...

*MOST* of the time, these strategic decisions are done on a golf course mate, logical choices rarely come into it.

SplitBrain

Excellent...

Just a bloody excellent article, really made my morning, have a bit of a lump in my throat to be honest as I am Ex-Sun myself.

While McNealy was a great former captain of the IT industry, I think Ellison has got it completely 100% spot on, he also has aggression I think is required to push Sun's technolgies and isn't afraid of playing a little dirty (raising core prices on Itaniums for one...)

Here's one Solaris guy who is quite a happy chappy at how things turned out, could have been a hell of a lot worse....

Oracle slashes software prices on own iron

SplitBrain
FAIL

You just don't get it dude...

I'm not contesting that in the heavy single threaded arena Sun/Oracle have a disavantage at the moment, Power and Intel's CPU's have the edge. You seem to think this is JUST about the hardware, trust me it isn't, as you probably know yourself. A large proportion of the Unix market runs that Oracle DB, as it is bloody good, it's all about that DB and the overall cost of that DB, what sit's beneath it really doesnt matter all that much...

If Oracle Sell you an completely integrated stack, tested at every level, which outperforms anything else for a given price point both in terms of cap-ex or support costs, who the hell care's if the thing is is using a larger number of weaker single thread cpu's than an IBM/HP box which has a smaller number of meatier cpu's???

True HP sells a lot of servers (low margin x86 tin mostly) running every type of app out there, but are you seriously going to tell me that in the future HP will be able to outdo Oracle for price/performance running the dominant ORACLE Database?? Impossible. Even if they did technically do it, Oracle can just undercut and make up the margin elsewhere in the stack, DB/Fusion middleware or whatever, thats where the real money is made, and it's market share is huge. You failed to answer my question about HP's lack of DB's/middleware/apps by the way. Name one that is even in the same league as Oracle's portfolio.....IBM have plenty, and Oracle acknowledges and respects this quite openly. Software sells servers my friend, not clock speeds and single threaded performance.

Growing Networking biz? Leading Network Management tools (that Sh1te called Openview, you serious!??) and leading storage!!! Please, don't make me laugh mate. You use the word "Lead(ing)" willy nilly, HP doesnt "Lead" in networking or storage, Cisco, juniper, Hitachi, EMC, Netapp a bunch of others would disagree with you there.

Best bet for HP, buy SAP, it's all about the software son.....without good software, HP is just going to be a cheap tin pusher while the other giants like IBM/Oracle mop up the high margin markets.

SplitBrain
Go

About time...

Well, can't say I'm surprised, it's about bloody time to be honest, I would have expected them to do this a bit sooner but with hindsight that would have looked too brash, even for Larry. They have timed it well to coincide with the Sunrise Supercluster jobby (love these new names..) and the Sparc T3's/T4's and a decent roadmap now in the public domain, not to mention the HP spat.

Some will cry foul that Oracle is abusing it's monopoly in the enterprise DB market, and it is, but this is just good business sense and is of course, flippin obvious...IBM has done this for years, not to mention M$. HP is the focus for Larry's aggression, and I don't see anyone at HP who can tussle with him, HP don't make their own chips, no Enterprise DB, no real middleware and no standout business app's so hence no integration and poor relative performance compared to Oracle and IBM.

HP will soon be finished in the High End, they will be left to compete with the likes of Dell at the bottom end of the x86 tin pusher game, which to be frank is where they belong, because in this new highly integrated hardware/software world we are heading in to, they have nothing to offer.

Enter Matt Bryant...

HP cutting 1,300 (more) UK jobs, union claims

SplitBrain

Horrible Company

Like many have said, a glorified reseller which "Invents" bugger all, and shafts its employees worse than Ron Jeremy.

I have not ever met one happy HP employee, and I have worked with a lot of them from various areas from HPUX to EVA to Openview employees.

Contrast with what was Sun where I was an employee (IBM too), where nearly everyone had at least some pride for the company and the engineering/academia it stood for.

Fujitsu starts building 10 petaflops Sparc64 super

SplitBrain
WTF?

Here's hoping it's make commercial.

Well, it's about bloody time there was a SPARC monster in the top 10, Sun never had the resources to do it seriously and it's taken Fujitsu with Japanese government backing (much like the US has backed the IBM Power based supers in the past) to create a next gen SPARC cpu with the grunt and scalability to do it.

I sincerely hope this CPU see's the light of day in the enterprise space, too much investment has gone into it for that not to happen.....in fact I would put money on a spin off of this CPU coming to market soon.

What OS is it running? Or is it not known yet? If it's Solaris 11 then we can be pretty damn sure we will see boxes based on this cpu in the field in the next couple of years.

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