I Want to Buy a Zoo, Not an Oracle System

Most people don’t think about going to the zoo in the middle of winter. But it’s actually the very best time to go.

No crowds, the zebra fried oreo shacks are closed, and the animals are at their very best. And, after all, isn’t that what it’s really all about?

Last week, I had a spectacular visit. The polar bears were playing with dead Christmas trees, the seals and sea lions were playing with their rubber balls, and the grizzly cubs were playing with themselves.

And then there’s the Rainforest. Imagine stepping from a cold snowy Cleveland day into a zoological tropical paradise. Sort of like the feeling you get when the plane doors open, you get your carry-on from the overhead, and you step off in Miami. My rainforest favorites are the tropical monkeys, the river otters, and, of course, the anteaters. But alas, last week, the anteaters were still, lying on their sides, hiding behind a crop of rocks.

And that’s how I’ve been feeling lately about Oracle.

See what’s hiding behind the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster and Exadata systems. “Must buy” storage server software.

See what’s hiding behind that pricing in the Oracle benchmark. Artificially low support costs.

See what’s hiding behind Oracle’s “Itanium roadmap.” An investigation into Oracle’s “potentially abusive” practices.

What else do YOU think Oracle is hiding? All thoughts welcome.

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Oracle SPARC T4-4 server (4 sockets/32 cores/256 threads) 205,792 QphH@3000GB, $4.10/QphH@3000GB, available 5/31/12.
Source: http://www.tpc.org. Results current as of 1/11/12.
TPC-C ,TPC-H, and TPC-E are trademarks of the Transaction Performance Processing Council (TPPC).

The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

technorati tags: IBM, systems, performance, Sun, SPARC,TPC-H,Oracle,11g,SuperCluster,T4-4,benchmark,Itanium,Autorite,HP,pricing,memory,Exadata,benchmarking

HP’s Converged Infrastructure, You Blockhead!!!

A few days ago, home for Thanksgiving, I encountered one of my old friends from childhood. A little wooden wagon, bright red with a pull string, now peeling paint. It holds as cargo about 50 wooden blocks of various shapes, sizes and colors. I remember wheeling these blocks around and then lovingly building towers that would come crashing down. You can’t get much better than that.

So I thought it was ironic this morning to read an article in the newspaper that stated that toy building blocks are finally back in style. There are now block workshops, block classes, even block consultants. Educators are finally realizing, once again, that blocks contribute to absorption of math concepts, higher test scores, and better language acquisition.

This is new news? There have been studies on this since the mid 20th century. Papers have been written on this topic, several major ones in the last decade. I could have told any researcher about this link — when I was six.

I had this same feeling looking at HP’s recent server announcement of future intentions. Project “Odyssey” is advertised as a development roadmap of UNIX and x86 architectures aimed at mission-critical computing focused on availability and performance. Here are my thoughts:

First and foremost, this is a roadmap folks. Roadmaps are nice. They help us look into the future. Just like with Itanium. And HP’s PC business. (Oh, right, that’s back on again, isn’t it?)

Hardware availability dates are “around two years.” Wouldn’t bet my business on that one. Remember that the original Odyssey around the time of the Trojan war took ten years.

Some of these integrated hardware/software architecture plans sound a bit to me like trying to force a square block into a round hole. It was always hard to do this when I was a kid.

HP is touting that clients need to be able to choose the best environment for their needs. Gee, wow, sounds a lot like the established and well-respected IBM Fit for Purpose methodology.

HP is promoting scale up and scale out abilities, application mobility, migration tools, sophisticated virtualization capabilities, RAS, and resiliency. Again, this is sounding very familiar to me. With IBM, you can get this NOW.

Meg needed to do something in light of Itanium/HP-UX decline. But instead of an “Odyssey” to Mars, it’s really just realizing what is basic to mission-critical computing — an area that IBM has excelled in for many, many years.

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The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

technorati tags: IBM, systems, performance, HP, Superdome,Integrity,x86,Itanium,HP-UX,Odyssey,benchmark,benchmarking

Oracle, Itanium, and Crisco

I needed to polish my patent leather shoes for a wedding this weekend. They were scuffed and dull and surely it made sense to polish them for this big event. Unfortunately I didn’t have any polish that was made for patent leather — so I took to the Internet.

Of course I don’t believe everything I read on the Internet. But several sites said that vegetable oil could be used in place of polish for patent leather and would give you an incredible shine.

Done. I had never seen shoes look so bad. They were greasy. They had a strange smell. And then the dog came over and started licking them.

So again, don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. And that’s how I felt about Oracle’s new statement on stopping development for Itanium. Instead of placing “enterprise and governments at risk” and costing them tons, Oracle is actually claiming that they are loyally giving customers “advance notice.”

Meanwhile, I read this morning (in the NY Times of all places) that Larry is on jury duty this week. For all of us who have ever tried to get a certain time for jury duty, all we can ask is — How did he work that one out?

I can just see the next press release from Oracle on Exadata: We are not publishing any industry standard benchmarks on Exadata because that would only hurt our customers by giving them too much good information.

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The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management.

technorati tags: IBM, systems, performance, Oracle, Intel,Itanium,HP,Larry,Crisco,Exadata,benchmark,benchmarking