Oracle OpenWorld Keynote: Scott & Larry
12 Oct '09 - 07:18 by benrTonight was a significant evening for Sun & Oracle. The opening keynote of Oracle OpenWorld 2009 was provided by Scott McNealy with an appearance by Larry Ellison. There is a lot to unpack here, so I'm going to break it down into sections.
The Acquisition
This is the first event I've attended as "press". As such I got all the press perks, namely access to announcement details in the press room and early access to the keynote for prime seats, in my case, right behind all the Sun Microsystems reserved seating. Talking with others there to cover the event was interesting in and of itself. Clearly everyone was looking for new information regarding the merger. None was expected but it was hoped for and we all listened attentively.
Here you can see (from left to right) Dr. James Gosling (creator of Java), Scott McNealy (Sun Chairman), and John Fowler (Sun EVP Systems). These were the speakers from the Sun side of the house, only Larry came up to represent Oracle.
Scott obviously thought the acquisition was a good thing and spent a lot of time about the history of Sun as an innovation driver (building his legacy). James came up to say that he thought it was a good thing for Java and the only hiccups along the way were with regard to Oracle learning now to interact with a community as large as that around Java. John showed off some of the new goodness from Sun and pointed to Oracle continued interest in Solaris, SPARC, and X86.
Larry wanted to hammer home the commitment they are making to Sun. He talked about the recent ads that Oracle's been putting out and how they are fighting against IBM who's trying to capitalize on the confusion. He re-iterated that Oracle will increase the money going into SPARC, Solaris, Java, and added to the list MySQL. He's very clear that nothing is getting chopped, he needs to whole company. With regard to MySQL he pointed out to Sleepycat (BerkelyDB) and InnoDB as things that Oracle owns and has invested in and been able to make some money with and intends to do the same with MySQL. He maintains that MySQL in no way competes with Oracle.
The more Larry talks the more comfortable it seems everyone is getting with this deal. Early estimates were that almost 50% of the company would be let go and there would be major changes in the companies product lineup. More and more those estimates are dropping below 30% and suggest that nothing will be cut, but rather pruned neatly into a more structured form. Best line of the nite was from larry, "We're in it to win."
The Benchmarks
Larry drove the point about synergies between Oracle and Sun home in 2 ways. The first was talking about the previously released Sun/Oracle ExaData v2 product (pictured above). The second was to show that with Sun's technology today, pre-acquisition, is the best platform available for Oracle even against IBM's monster POWER 595 system which consumes 76 standard racks. Sun's solution that beat it consumes only 9 racks, is fault tolerant, based on SPARC (Niagara), got 25% more throughput, gets 16 times better response times, and obviously uses a hell of a lot less power to boot.
I had a conversation with the PAE guys there and got a lot of great details on the configuration and how they made it work. Here are some highlights...
So the Sun system that beat out the 595 was based on T5440 (UltraSPARC T2) systems connected to the new F5100 Flash Array. In order to make all this work in a fault tolerant way COMSTAR was used and throughout the process required absolutely no modification! Apparently the biggest "problem" they ran into some some minor tweeking in the mpt and sd drivers because they weren't designed to hand the extreme number of IOPS coming from the flash arrays. More shockingly, when they got the TPC-C number that beat IBM the CPU's were 50% idle! And, if you can believe it, during the whole time Sun was working on this benchmark of all the flash modules involved, only a single one failed! Just one!
The Product
So the product announcement we'd been waiting for happened here: the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array and its little brother the Sun Flash Accelerator F20 PCIe Card.
The F5100 was illuded to a couple months ago by Andy Bechtolsheim; a 1U storage array filled to the brim with Sun SO-DIMM form factor Flash Modules. It can be ordered with as little as 20 modules for 480GB raw or as large as 80 modules for almost 2TB raw capacity. Sequential Write performance on the 80 module unit is rated at 9.7 GB/sec. It physically connects via SAS.
The F20 PCIe Flash Card is just a smaller version. Up to 98GB of Flash rated at 501 MB/s Seq Write. All the goodness of high performance flash storage but you just drop it into a PCIe slot and go. A fantastic solution for databases in need of fast logging capabilities, just plug it into a PCIe slot and define it as your new log device.
Jonathan
Guess who wasn't present. Jonathan is nowhere to be found. In fact, I haven't seen him since JavaOne. Since this deal has occured Jonathan has been pushed to the back seat while Scott has insisted on driving. The question is why?
I'm very curious how history will record things with all the details filled in. Did Jonathan sell us down the river? Or, perhaps, Scott's been driving things far longer than we realize and Jonathan has been something of a pawn in the latter days of the company. Its clear that it was Jonathan's management of the company that delivered us to the point acquisition was required, but we can't forget that he did do a number of good things, even if they didn't actually benefit the company in return.
I'm not going to make a judgment call just yet... but I'm starting to almost feel like Jonathan got screwed here more than we realize. Never the less, he'll have his millions of dollars to console him while the rest of us are left holding a fist full of memories and broken dreams.
Watch the Keynote!
Make some time, OnDemand Replays available... you'll enjoy it.
Would love to look at the OnDemand Replays but it keeps crashing my Firefox 3.5.3
Well it does on Windows not OpenSolaris :-)
That just says Error Occurred
Paul
Paul Johnston (Email) (URL) - 12 October '09 - 09:53
@Paul JohnstonJust search for Ellison on youtube and sort by date, you can find larrys talk there
Che (URL) - 12 October '09 - 12:11
What good things has Jonathan done?Jonathan and Scott both failed to deliver; along with most of the middle management at Sun. Sun has/had the best products the past several years but it failed to reap the benefits.
I think before long, people will start to get “attached” to (aka “fans” of) Oracle, just as we’ve all gotten attached to Sun. But hopefully Oracle doesn’t take along all this extra baggage with it.
Anil (Email) (URL) - 12 October '09 - 21:23
@Anil: The good that Jonathan has done was moving to embrace Open Source is a big way, adopting X86, and all the good things that went into Solaris 10. Some of these he was more involved with than others.This doesn’t change the fact, that as you point out, Sun failed to capitalize on the technology. Sun marketing, sales, and services never were pulled together and properly engaged behind the technology.
When I’ve talked with customers over the last several years, the most consistent comment about Sun offerings was “Its great! But they won’t sell it to me!” Sales sucked. Manufacturing sucked. Bad management at the top.
But this weekend I defiantly like the vibe from Oracle. They want to fight! I like that feeling again.
benr - 12 October '09 - 22:30
From the way I read it Scott called Larry only after Jonathon was already shopping the company. So…If you want to blame someone for Sun going down spend your own idle time doing that. In the meantime I’ll be finding new bugs in OpenSolaris and submitting complaints since it appears that this OS is still going to have legs after all.
Alan Pae (Email) (URL) - 13 October '09 - 01:12
In my pow Jonathan tried to move Sun from being a group of innovative engineers to a sales oriented company. A task he had to do in order to make Sun profitable after many years of spending to much money on inventing stuff they did not sell (enough to cover the expenses). But Jonathan did not succeed because the legacy within Sun was to rigid, so with Orcale taking over I expect to see a more sales oriented focus which can only be good news for the amazing technology Sun in fact have invented over the years. In my mind there’s no doubt that the world would be a better place if IT was depending on a platform from Sun compared to the a platform from Microsoft and Intel.So go for it Oracle sales people – you will have some uniqueness to sell in the future !
Jan Flodin (Email) - 13 October '09 - 12:16
This is a great piece. Very thought provoking. I like the sort of ending that leaves it opn to personal input. Makes it work for just about everyone I think. Nicely done! I’ll subscribe.true religion (Email) (URL) - 14 October '09 - 02:34
I don’t think Scott is insisting on driving anything. It was widely rumored that Scott was in favor of the Oracle deal and Jonathan strongly against, so I suspect Jonathan has just gone off on gardening leave while the whole thing pans out.Wally (Email) - 14 October '09 - 19:43
Hey Ben, I have a question: Starting with build 124 there is a project called rbridges that went into the distribution, looks lime a combined routing/switching solution (Will we see the Sun Network 7000 soon?). Unfortunatly there are no demos or examples. Can you provide some of them? Thank you!Dennis - 15 October '09 - 14:43
I’m in the bay area for Open World.Man let me tell you that this is first time I’ve even gotten to interact directly with the Sun Backline engineers and they simply rock!
The Oracle sessions were great too but the opportunity of interacting with some of the guys who build the stuff we run in our Datacenters is simply fabulous.
Unfortunately, Sun got smaller rooms, primarily at the Marriott and with the rain and all that, didn’t get too good a turnout (as far as attendees numbers goes).
As you rightly pointed out, the Sunday evening and Wednesday evening Keynotes were very powerful messages that Larry and Scott/Sun sent out. I can see both Oracle and Sun stock improved a little.
Also, Oracle seems well poised to start really selling this stuff (hopefully they will not cut the throats of their customers though) well…
Cheers!
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