Larry Ellison to Announce OLTP Database Machine on… Sun Hardware

Avatar Category: Database | 320 days ago |
In line with my prediction from few days ago, Larry Ellison is announcing the new Database Machine — the new version is targeting OLTP workloads and is based on Sun hardware.

Looks like I just got the date wrong. Oh well, now is the announcement, hype and demo is at the Oracle Open World and shipments are to start upon Oracle-Sun acquisition completion.
So what’s new in Exadata that I didn’t mention in the previous blog post? Ah, right — Sun FlashFire technology. It’s no surprise that the new OLTP version of Database Machine is boosting the IOPS (IO’s per second) capacity by introducing the flash drives. Nothing prevented Oracle to place flash disks into the original Exadata, not from technology perspective.

You should also know that Sun has been investing a lot in its Open Storage concept. This is very similar to what Oracle did with Exadata Server except that Sun initiative is a universal storage solution with ZFS in its core while Oracle Exadata is specialized for Oracle databases leveraging Oracle ASM. What does it tell me? Two leading companies have the opportunity to merge storage technologies. I’ll take that!
I might have underestimated Oracle on how quickly it can leverage Solaris SPARC for the database servers in the OLTP Database Machine (Mark, you might be right). SPARC platform has been an excellent fit for high throughput OLTP systems. Again, we already saw Larry’s commitment to develop SPARC technology so within a month, Sun customers’ mood should be rising higher and higher these days.
I will excuse myself for self-quoting from half a year ago:
… it does look like Sun failed to make money on a number of great technologies and products such as Solaris and Java. Why is another story — there were great deal of speculations from people who must know it much better than me. My conclusion is that IBM is a great money making machine while Sun is the technology making machine.
What about Oracle? Well, I think that so far they have excelled in both - money making and technology making. Isn’t that a wonderful combination?
I must say I’m excited to see that Oracle is picking up all the juicy pieces of Sun technologies and targets to make money on them and not sell them off in bits.

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