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Sun hardware will be developed
AS THE NEW OWNER of Sun Microsystems, Oracle has promised to keep investing in Sun's hardware now that it has taken over the company.
Observers had wondered what Oracle would do with the hardware side of the company and there was talk that it might be sold off to HP or some other rival.
Now it seems that Oracle will continue to invest in all of Sun Microsystems' main server platforms. The move is part of an effort to convince Sun customers that they should stick with the company and its products.
IBM and HP have been telling the world plus dog that Oracle has not got what it takes to run a hardware company and is not particularly interested in Sun's server range. So far they have done well at convincing people as the numbers of customer defections away from Sun have increased over recent months.
Later today Oracle executives are due to give an update on their strategy for the combined company, including how it will reconcile overlapping products.
Bob Shimp, group vice president for Oracle's technology business unit, told PC World that Oracle will continue to invest in Sun's multithreaded UltraSparc T family of processors. These are the beasts that are used in its Niagara servers and the M series server family, which are based on the Sparc64 processors developed by Fujitsu.
Sparc platforms will also benefit from Oracle's cheque book and Oracle will also continue to develop and sell Sun's x64-based servers and also its Netra servers, he said.
Until this afternoon it remains unclear what Sun hardware product lines, if any, Oracle intends to chop. µ
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Sun's management didn't learn a thing from the death of DEC. They were chasing commodity x86 hardware right over a cliff. Business school may claim everything is a widget but in the real world, companies that fail to differentiate themselves are in a race to the bottom.
Oracle will bring the focus back to transaction processing which is what servers are really all about. SPARC CPUs are more than fast enough and they have a better IOPS to power ratio than x86. The problem at Sun is the disk sub-system compared to the big IBM machines. Oracle understands performance requires better storage systems, not more Java.
Whatever happened to Montalvo the x86 cpu designer that Sun bought??
"Will continue to invest" is code for "will make massive cuts". There's little reason for Oracle to continue to pour more into the development of proprietary standards-based hardware other than to milk the installed base. A good hardware/software services business simply doesn't need proprietary hardware.
ORACLE Exadata Server is one of the best Intel Powered Server. I hope that Intel will help ORACLE to get more marketshare in server againts their competitors like Intel has helped Apple to win the high margin PC segment.
Sun hardware is officially dead in the water. A shame really as it was quite good back at the beginning of the 90s.