Oracle Executives Regret Sun Acquisition

According to a filing by HP in a dispute with Oracle over the porting of its software to the Itanium platform, HP stated that Oracle had gone with an aggressive strategy against HP's Itanium servers after sales of competing Sun's Sparc servers have dropped considerably. In addition to that, HP stated that Oracle executives believed that the 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems was a mistake.

Oracle announced back in 2011 that it would not support HP's Itanium platform on future products, which marked the latest move by the company that made running software on the HP platform more expensive. HP also submitted the filing to the Superior Court of the State of California, Santa Clara County, in opposition to Oracle's motion for summary adjudication.

Oracle decided not to support servers running the Itanium processors due to the fact that the processors were nearing the end of their life. When Oracle made this move, HP decided to sue because HP uses the chip in its high-end servers. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made the decision not to port the software, a decision that was only shared with a few Oracle executives. Not even Oracle's Senior Vice President of Database Development was consulted on the issue.

Last month HP filed for a pretrial ruling that Oracle is contractually required to offer future versions of its software on the Itanium platform and claimed that an agreement between Intel and HP ensured that the Itanium was not an end-of-life processor. Oracle, on the other hand, stated that HP fraudulently induced it to enter into the agreement, stating that the company withheld information that it was secretly paying Intel $88 million per year to artificially continue the Itanium processor's life span.

The most recent filing points out that Intel had refuted Oracle's claims regarding the supposed end-of-life of the Itanium platform. A testimony from the Intel Executive in charge also made it clear that, "far from being near its demise, Itanium had just gained new vitality when Oracle made its announcement."

Oracle's internal sales communications shows the real reason the company decided to drop support for Itanium. The sales force was exhorted to take full advantage of the Itanium announcement according to the new filing, which quoted a sales executive from Oracle saying that, "we are the ones dictating IT/Itanium obsolescence."

According to a statement from HP, "This new information that has come up during the discovery period further underscores Oracle's behavior as 'anti-customer'. It reinforces the fact that Oracle breached its contractual agreement with HP in a bad faith attempt to drive hardware sales from Itanium to Sun servers." Deborah Hellinger, spokeswoman for Oracle, declined to comment on the filing.

Source: Computer World - HP: Oracle executives believed Sun acquisition was a mistake

Oracle Unveils New High-Performance Sun Fire Clusters

Holding true to CEO Larry Ellison's promise that Oracle would primarily focus on the high-performance server market, last Monday Oracle expanded its line of x86 Sun servers with new rackmount, blade and network clustering servers. The newly released Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems are intended for massive server configurations and will deliver a smaller footprint than previous generations of Sun File Server hardware. The servers themselves will come equipped with Xeon 5600 and 7500 processors, the latter is aimed at mission-critical systems which must always run and never go down. In doing so Oracle is competing against Intels Itanium processor line and even Sun's own SPARC line which has raised a few eyebrows.

The Sun Fire x86 Clustered Systems are designed for customers that run a mix of Oracle and non-Oracle enterprise workloads across a variety of systems. The cluster servers themselves consist of five rackmounted and two bladed servers that can hold two to eight processors and have been tightly integrated with Oracle software, middleware and management applications. Oracle has assured their customers that all Oracle software and middleware has been certified to run on these systems which have been optimized for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux, and Oracle VM which supports Red Hat, Suse Linux, and even the KVM hypervisor.

In addition to optimizing their software and operating systems, Oracle has integrated Sun's Ops Center with its own Enterprise Manager providing a dynamic work flow for a single "lights-out" point of management. Blades, servers, storage, networking, virtualization and even powering the systems on and off can be handled all from a single web browser. Oracle has even included an Integration Assistant so you can configure and boot the systems straight out of the box within minutes. Even with no OS installed, the systems can reach out across the Internet to Oracle servers to check for firmware and BIOS updates and then download and install them.

"We claim we can manage a full blade ecosystem without requiring any network skills, because network virtualization is done in the silicon and through Oracle middleware technology," - Dimitris Dovas, director of product management for Sun hardware at Oracle

Oracle claims that this hardware will be able to deliver up to a 45 percent improvement in energy efficiency over previous generation systems and also the ability to run 70 percent more workload. They also claim that their new hardware can deliver the same performance in one-tenth the space with one-tenth the devices and one-fifth the number of network cables. The simpler cabling on the Sun Fire systems come through oracles Sun Blade 6000 10 GbE switches which are embedded within the blade itself or inserted through the top of the rack to connect the clusters. This improvement allows the server clusters to communicate to a network without having to connect though a networking cable and a switch.

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