Posts by Mr Wrong

HPE SAN causes four-day outage at Australian Tax Office

Everything what I've heard about this case since it began in December looks like it's ATO who didn't have any real DR, who had screwed up architecture big time and didn't even have backups that would be restorable in less than one month time. And it's HP who gets contineous bashing because of those obvious end customer faults. They have extreme patience that there are no even leaks to media saying how this really looks like, their only comments that "problem is not of a kind that has any probability to happen anywhere else" suggest to me strongly that reason was on customer/architecture side, not in HW. My internal translator tells me that they wanted to say that no one else is stupid enough to do such things. I'm not going to say they are saints, finally it's their HW that failed, but (sorry for being obvious) there's no HW on Earth that never fails. If they thought that they have one, it only adds to their complete lack of any competence whatsoever

HPE spins out enterprise services business into CSC

what next?

Does anyone else also think that after that HPE will become perfect acquisition target for Larry E? And he finally will have its own IBM

He's baaack: Microsoft's axeman Nadella to give Chinese staff the chop

Even if Ballmer had an idea why he's buying Nokia factories, Nadella definitely doesn't seem to share this idea. He will shut them all down and sooner or later he will quit making phones at all. I would do it sooner if I were him, Ballmer's step into hardware making was plain stupid.

And for Nokia now it looks like it was extremely good deal: they got rid of idiot CEO and his management board, and got rid of factories that made huge costs to maintain. Next year, if they would decide that they wish to get some income from their still well known consumer brand and make some android phones, they will do them the same way as majority of competitors - using Foxconn. Pure profit for them, all loses on MS site

HP cloud reorg shock: Ex-Eucalyptus boss Mårten Mickos backs off

Sounds like that guy admitted he's good at technology and organizing communities but bad at corporate management. So he will stick to what he's good at and leave the rest to old school HP bureaucrats. Doesn't sound like a bad idea, he always looked to me like a CTO kind of guy, not someone responsible for sales.

Though for what purpose HP has bought Eucalyptus I think I will never understand.

No one trusts Oracle, shrieks CCL as cloudy ball misses its goals

Re: Typical, Socialist, Anti-competition Propaganda.

"Oracle still don't acknowledge Hypervisor type virtualisation in their licensing"

Of course they do - but only their own one. No one can force them to support ESX or H-V if they don't want to.

EMC has nothing to say on VMware sale plan

No chance

It's worth 40bn, HP doesn't have that much money to waste, this time someone else will have to be a lucky buyer

Rimini Street promises 'business as usual' after Oracle IP judgment

Re: Hang on a sec

Whole problem is about having or not support contract with Oracle. Rimini tried to set their business model on assumption that end customer doesn't need support contract with oracle, it's enough that they have contract with Rimini. Which is not doable with Oracle licensing terms. Besides I think nowadays it's not even possible as you cannot buy database license without support contract (though I don't know if the same applies to apps licensing). So Rimini initial business model was plain wrong and now they will pay for that. With other oracle support providers (Accenture, HP, IBM, Atos etc) it's different story as you always had to buy their services in addition to obligatory oracle support payment.

Besides it's important to add that oracle "support" doesn't give you any real support, ok, maybe their platinum services do that, but I've never met anyone who would even consider buying them. It's basically obligatory payment which gives you access to patches and (limited) knowledge base, if anyone thinks that oracle support will solve any real problem for him, he's very wrong.

Oracle: That BUG in our In-Memory Option will be fixed in October

Nothing new

Actually there were many such cases in the past, in which oracle feature usage view was just showing BS - like features considered to be parts of tuning pack were logged on as used in this view as a result of running oracle automatic maintenance jobs, that no one even had to be aware of. I think I also remember a case when installing sample schemas made partitioning option shown as used etc. But this doesn't mean they are going to make you pay for that - ok, it is possible that someone could use it to cheat on unaware customer but I was being audited by oracle twice, and each such situation when feature usage differed from license we had was checked separately and in details. I don't think there's company in the world who would accept result of such audit without carefully checking. In all my cases none of such nonsense made us pay a single cent, of course there were situations where people really activated separately licensed modules, usually tuning pack, without knowing what they do - but that wasn't really "by accident", they wanted to use feature that oracle advertised but didn't know it means paying and oracle was so nice that let them do that without asking. Which shouldn't be possible if this company would treat customers as customers, not hostages. But that's separate story.

HP: A firmware update is just for Christmas, not for EVA

What???

Anyone using storage array or server in production without valid support contract is complete idiot that should be fired asap. What are you people talking about. The only thing I'm a bit surprised is that by now they offered free upgrades to people without support, I don't know any other HW supplier who would be so nice. But also no one expects that, as it's obvious for everyone that if you're using HW in prod, you pay for HW support too. Period

HP still NOT porting HP-UX to x86?

Re: HP's inability to move off Itanic ...

"Erm... where? Not seen any, and the other sysadmin and architect people I know don't seem to have come across it either."

There are some parts of Earth outside UK, I think that's the reason.

"Ah, immediate troll exposure! You have obviously never touched clustering on Linux. Go look at RHEL, it's clustering has been excellent for years."

I'm working with linux and unix servers as oracle db admin for 15 years. RHEL clustering is very far from being excellent. Its functionality is pretty basic. Majority of RHEL clusters I've seen had HP Serviceguard installed instead, even if this is also far from perfect. I'm afraid you have no clue how clustering in Solaris works and how far and how nice it is integrated with oracle, since Sun years. There's no other solution on a market like this. Ask any oracle dba.

"You really are just exposing your lack of knowledge. KVM has been around for years and is an enterprise-level product, let alone good old Xen. The virtualisation in hp-ux is good in width (more ways to virtualise), but I'd have to say Integrity Virtual Machines is no better than KVM. And as for hp's clustering, Serviceguard has been available for Linux for years, it just lags the hp-ux version"

Now go and read oracle rdbms license and especially pricing part, in terms of different hypervisors used. Then we can discuss, cause now it really doesn't make sense as you have no clue.

Re: HP's inability to move off Itanic ...

Oracle may not have interest in x86 platform but it's irrelevant, I said that people tend to use solaris on proliant. I haven't met anyone buying Sun x86 servers since they are oracle owned (I don't mean exa-stuff of course). People buy proliant servers and then run Solaris on it for oracle databases.

"Linux doesn't have clustering or virtualization? Are you for real? You've never heard of Lustre or KVM?"

I meant Linux as a platform for oracle database. Taking into account all important things, especially oracle licensing details, on x86 you can choose basically between windows, oracle linux or x86 solaris. Windows is out of question usually, and when comparing these 2, Solaris is much better offer, especially in terms of clustering and virtualization. Lustre and KVM are nice technologies but have absolutely no importance here. Have a look how oracle licenses and supports database on different virtual platforms, it's clear that you have no clue.

Re: HP's inability to move off Itanic ...

Actually Solaris on x86 became quite popular platform for not-so-much-mission-critical oracle installations lately. I have heard and seen many customers going for that during last couple of months. Usually on HP Proliant HW by the way :D People are afraid of choosing non-oracle system platform and linux is still missing too many things (decent clustering for instance) to be taken seriously for enterprise production workloads. Of course this is only temporary in my opinion, when only HP will port clustering /virtualization solutions from HPUX to Linux, there'll be no reason to use Solaris x86 anymore.

HP-Oracle Itanium smackdown starts

Re: Errata

Most probably they don't make so much money on them (though I have no idea how much exactly) but most of customers using them are very "prestigious ones" - huge financial institutions in case of NonStop and lots of military things in case of VMS. They won't migrate anytime soon and HP will keep those up and running as long as possible.

Re: So what?

"Any customer that was convinced to migrate off of mainframe to Itanium should be furious"

Can't agree to that. People migrated off the mainframe cause it was plainly much cheaper. No one was so naive to believe in marketing BS about what has a future and what has not. Or rather - if anyone was so naive, it's his own problem. But I don't believe there were many cases like that. People that keep using mainframes are usually the ones who counted that apps migration/rewriting would cost them much more than savings on cheap hardware, that's all. Possibility to run linux on z is only a matter of making their bitterness a bit more sweeter, no one buys mainframe only to run linux on it.

Re: So what?

Show me one chip vendor that wasn't ever lying with his roadmaps. For sure you cannot say that about either Sun/Oracle or IBM. They are as messy as Itanium. Or worse in case of sparc.

The rest of your post looks like written 10 years ago. Who cares what was going on there. There's no compaq anywhere anymore, servers are named HP Proliant since ages. It has nothing in common with current story.

EnterpriseDB comforts HP-UX shops with PostgreSQL

compatibility

If it would be really 99.99995%, it would be fantastic, much more than oracle guarantees if you'd go for any upgrade of their software. Usually many things stop working as it should then. But I'm afraid it may be rather 80, maybe 90%, not 99.9999.

IBM chases Itanium shops with 'Breakfree' deals

SAP

I wasn't talking about SAP. SAP was always relatively easy to be moved between different supported platforms, I was talking about large, critical, proprietary applications.

oracle to DB2

Oracle to DB2 migration is nightmare, and for any mission critical app (and we're talking about this kind of apps here) it means project for many months and damn expensive consultants working 24x7 for weeks to make it work properly. I don't believe they will succeed in selling such a thing in any reasonable amounts. They can sell some power systems, with oracle, to replace old HP systems, true, as long as Larry will keep supporting power. But I guess people will rather prefer to save some money and go for xeons instead. But then, it's HP who has definitely best x86 offer at the moment. And it's as close to business critical as it never been before. I don't think HP will be the big looser here. Just changing the pocket to which money is flowing.

IBM gets fat on Oracle-HP Itanium spat

But...

But I must also add that I believe that all oracle users will end up in same basket sooner or later anyway as I expect finally that it will be available only for oracle-owned platforms. With Solaris as a default DB boot loader, Time to start thinking about some serious alternatives to oracle - but where they are when they are needed... DB2 is not, MSSQL neither.

Moving to Linux

Moving to linux would be good option but I can bet any money that next move from Larry would be saying that the only good linux is our linux and dessuporting RHEL and Suse. So by moving from Itanium to linux you'll end up in same basket.

HP sues Oracle over Itanic withdrawal

you're missing one point...

"HP could use some of that money to port HP-UX, NSK, and VMS to run on x86-64 Proliant, and Oracle could use their share to port Oracle to x86-64 on HP-UX and VMS on x86-64 (Oracle don't do NSK, do they?)."

HP could use some money to port HP-UX and OpenVMS to x86, and I'd bet they will do it one day, but it's very unlikely that it would make Oracle prepare their software for such platform. Why would they? They just shown that they don't care about possible revenue losses and customer dissatisfaction, they are not going to do anything for customer's good and especially for HP's good. So yes, HP may port HP-UX but there won't be oracle database for this anymore. If this lawsuit is not successful of course (but I doubt, they will rather settle on some money been paid I guess).

No, Oracle doesn't do any software for NSK and also for VMS they don't develop new versions since some time. So it's only about HP-UX and Integrity/Superdome platform. But it's still huge customer base, majority of SAP installations done in last few years globally uses this platform. These are all huge customers.

About lawsuit itself - few people only know what exactly is in the Alliance papers. I doubt that HP would risk potential PR disaster if they wouldn't have strong papers at hand. They didn't have to sue them, if they did, it means something.