From the Editor | Main Blog Index
April 21, 2009
On Monday Oracle announced that it plans to purchase Sun for $7.4 billion. Assuming no unforeseen glitches crop up, the deal should close sometime this summer.
The acquisition potentially makes Oracle a much more formidable adversary to IBM, Microsoft and its smaller competitors. With Java, Solaris, and Sun hardware in tow, Oracle will control a set of technologies that should blend nicely with the company's software and services business. Not one to shy away from hyperbole, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison declared: "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system -- applications to disk -- where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves."
I imagine IBM would take exception to that particular claim. In fact, if you listen to Monday's investor webcast on Oracle's Web site, you might get the impression that Oracle and Sun are about to invent system integration. Since most enterprise computing systems are built from commodity parts and open source software, the advantage of owning specific technologies is not as great as it used to be. If it was, Sun wouldn't be in the position it's in now.
The Oracle-Sun merger is getting mixed reviews from analysts and journalists. As Timothy Prickett Morgan writes at The Reg: "Sun and IBM mixed like oil and water. Oracle and Sun, the two original Silicon Valley IT startups (and no, Hewlett-Packard, oscilloscopes don't count as IT) and the two darlings of the dot-com boom, will mix something more like vinegar and oil -- you can whip it up into a colloid, at least."
I think that's a fairly accurate metaphor. On paper at least, Sun and Oracle are a decent fit. There is barely any product overlap (even Oracle's flagship Database 11G offering and Sun's MySQL may find a way to live peaceably with one another). Synergies between Sun's hardware, Solaris OS, and Java, along with Oracle's database software, are there to be had if Ellison can find a way to wrap all the pieces together. In general, the acquisition has better chemistry than the IBM-Sun deal.
The acquisition certainly has some critics. Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols doesn't think much good is going to come from this relationship, and starts this commentary as follows: "I'd thought about Oracle buying Sun. But, then I thought, 'Larry Ellison isn't that dumb.' Well, I was wrong. Ellison is that dumb. Oracle is buying Sun in what may be the most moronic technology acquisition of the 21st century."
Aw c'mon, this one isn't even close to some of the more ridiculous acquisitions we've seen over the last several years (think eBay and Skype). A lot of Oracle database software is run on Solaris and the company's Fusion middleware is based on Java. There's every reason to think that Oracle will be able to exploit Sun software and hardware to build higher value database appliances.
High performance computing may be a different story. Since Oracle hasn't divulged plans about how it will integrate the two companies, it's too soon to tell what will become of products like the Constellation blades, the Sun Grid Engine, Lustre storage, etc., but the signs are not particularly encouraging. From what has been publicly stated, the focus is clearly going to be on enterprise database systems. As of yet, no mention has been made of Sun's high-end computing aspirations.
In the latest TOP500 list, Sun claimed only seven systems, but, rightly or wrongly, the company saw HPC as a way to drive innovation in the rest of the company. And Sun's whole Redshift vision was about garnering computing at enormous scale and moving traditional applications into the cloud. As John West astutely pointed out at insideHPC, Ellison was trashing cloud computing just last year. I doubt if he's had an epiphany since then.
Once the deal closes, Sun's workforce and internal infrastructure are bound to get downsized. If Oracle's priorities are such that Sun's institutional knowledge in high-end technical computing are not retained, that will eventually mean there will be one less vendor in HPC.
Posted by Michael Feldman - April 21, 2009 @ 4:41 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
![]()
Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.
No Recent Blog Comments
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...
Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
Read more...
Supercomputing veteran, Bo Ewald, has been neck-deep in bleeding edge system development since his twelve-year stint at Cray Research back in the mid-1980s, which was followed by his tenure at large organizations like SGI and startups, including Scale Eight Corporation and Linux Networx. He has put his weight behind quantum company....
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...
May 09, 2013 |
The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
Read more...
May 08, 2013 |
For engineers looking to leverage high-performance computing, the accessibility of a cloud-based approach is a powerful draw, but there are costs that may not be readily apparent.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.