SAN FRANCISCO — Reporter’s Notebook Oracle Open World:
A quick update on data center news out of the Oracle Open World Conference so far.
Sunday night HP execs opened up the event and did a sales pitch for HP’s push into Cisco’s network market, and its converged infrastructure the BladeSystem Matrix. HP also realized that the majority of folks aren’t able to take advantage of its latest and greatest self-service IT machines because their existing application workloads don’t really match up, so it has rallied its professional services arm around the idea of application modernization, so they’ll come in and throw out, replace or rewrite your legacy apps so they can run on a BladeSystem Matrix. Get it?
Then Oracle’s CEO King Larry Ellison came out an inspirational video touting Oracle’s recent win at the America’s Cup. Then came out swinging at SalesForce.com, saying the SaaS sweetheart has security issues, it has customers’ data coexisting in same databases. System failures brings down many customers at once, and emphasized that Salesforce is not cloud. “It’s very different from Elastic Compute Cloud from Amazon,” Ellison said. “I don’t care what people call it as long as they understand that they are two things.”
The big announcement of the night was Oracle’s Exalogic, a 30-server box totaling 360 cores, interconnected with Infiniband. It runs with Oracle VM and two guest operating systems, Solaris and Linux.
Larry compared Oracle’s latest souped up data center infrastructure (private cloud in a box) to Marvel’s Iron Man. And announced that Oracle would be developing its own version of Linux to run on it with a modernized kernel optimized for Oracle’s software and hardware, Oracle Enterprise Unbreakable Linux.
This box is capable of one million HTTP requests per second, and Larry said two Exalogic racks could run all of Facebook. It also phones home when it’s about to break. “We should detect a fault before you do, and start preparing a fix right away,” Ellison said. Sounds kind of creepy.
Then, I swear Ellison said “If there’s a problem, yo I’ll solve it.” Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it. Really?
Exalogic starts around $1,075,000.
Monday morning former HP CEO Mark Hurd took the stage, and seemed no worse for wear following his recent dismissal from HP and the surrounding scandal and fired up the 8am crowd. Then Fujitsu’s Noriyuki Toyoki touted the future of SPARC and John Fowler announced a new SPARC T3 chip and offered a timeline for Solaris 11.
The first Oracle Solaris 11 Express release, expected by the end of calendar year 2010, will provide customers with timely access to the latest Oracle Solaris 11 Express features with an optional Oracle support agreement. This release is expected to be the path forward for developers, end-users and partners using previous generations of earlier Solaris and OpenSolaris releases.
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PHOTO ATTRIBUTION: Hartmann Studios via Oracle Photos on Flickr.
