Sun-acle ... Orasun ... Java ...

The acquisition has been given a green light in Europe. Now … as to what this means after nearly 10 months of uncertainty to Sun’s remaining customers, the ones that haven’t fled to other vendors, may be a moot question. What this means to various markets is also unknown. We haven’t seen much focus of Oracle in HPC. Indeed, this is a tiny market for Sun (its not their forte), and given that Sun will be a small part of Oracle …

HPC technologies at risk include SGE, Lustre, and I’d argue, VirtualBox. Call me a recent convert on the last, I like VirtualBox. But what does the acquisition mean to HPC at Sun? Or, better asked, does it matter? I am not convinced it does, other than to hasten a particular trajectory. HPC may be effectively dead at Sun + Oracle. Oracle has larger markets to attack. And they need to focus Sun. Moreover, the question of Sun’s hardware is bigger and more pressing than the HPC side. The hardware bits don’t fit well into Oracle. Oracle had been looking for takers, and my guess is they still are looking for takers. Not sure if they will find any to take everything, but possibly bits and pieces to various places. Face it, Oracle wanted Java. It now has Java. Everything else is icing, or toast.