Game over: Sun snarfed up by Oracle
By joe
- 4 minutes read - 659 wordsSee the PR. Oh my. Imagine one of several scenarios. Scenario 1: All other hardware vendors drop Oracle certification efforts and cease selling Oracle on their platforms as Oracle hasn’t stopped directly competing with them.
Scenario 2: Sun hardware largely goes by-by, enmasse, so Oracle can focus upon the bits that make sense for its business, and not piss its partners off too badly. I am guessing it is going to wind up much closer to 2 than to 1. Wouldn’t be surprised if the hardware is spun out and sold off or closed. This said, I think, while it may be early, it is safe to say that HPC at Sun is likely (completely) done. As is storage … though I suspect Oracle may wish to sell that off to EMC or someone. Wild guess …. Since Oracle will own Solaris, and it has been developing an open source alternative to zfs named btrfs, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if zfs is finally open sourced (as in GPLed). Yeah, you can argue that CDDL is somehow open. But if you can’t cross polinate between projects, open-ness is not really there … is it? Oracle looks to do GPL when they OSS something. [update] kudos to Sun’s board for the additional suitor. Unfortunately, it looks like Oracle hung back to wait and see what IBM would do. Its $7B offer toast, they were snarfed for $5.6B. More to the point, you can see what Sun means to Oracle. From this article:
Yup. There is another quote from thestreet.com.
Well, if he sticks to this, then this is scenario 1. And a good thing for EnterpriseDB and Greenplum. Yeah, suffice it to say that HPC at Sun is likely over. [update 2] Gets curiouser and curiouser. Sun owns MySQL. No Oracle owns MySQL. Sun has lots of PostgreSQL engineers. Now Oracle does. Thats worth a great deal more than the hardware me-thinks. Good job Larry … good job! Masterful stroke. I don’t think he wanted to wait for Sun to finish imploding and then collect it at the fire sale (ala SGI). He wanted the technology off the auction table. Now. [update 3] Gets curiouser and curiouser. Sun also owns Lustre. Talking with partners/customers over the last several months suggests the vast majority of them with a Lustre dependency have been looking to … um … mitigate the risk … yeah, thats it … of having a Lustre dependency. There are a few die hards, and they are not going to let it go without prying from cold dead fingers … but … the rest of them are scrambling to find alternatives. The folks we had spoken to all were fearful of the directions they had heard eminating from Sun on its future. [update 4] according to this article …
Hearing a number of rumors and other bits. Most likely road to profitability for this hardware … is selling the hardware division off to a hardware company. Oracle could go for the vertically integrated stack (ala Cisco) … Just think … an Oracle appliance box, complete with Oracle storage, Oracle backup, … Oracle will own MySQL, many PostgreSQL developers, Lustre, Java, Solaris, and other bits. MySQL … probably turn it into a weapon against Microsoft SQL server. Make it a gateway database. Lustre shouldn’t be used where OCFS2 is. No real advantage there. Java … well … its Java. Solaris … rapidly declining market share … may be fine as an appliance OS ala Nexenta … but for databases. They will still need a switch/network vendor and others for the full on integrated stack. I dunno … Not really sure if they are going this route. But they sure as heck arent going to try to purposefully tank sales before they decide what to do. More than likely the sales route (selling off the hardware that can be sold off) will be done. Some will likely be shut down.