Tag: larry ellison

Oracle expands cloud offerings

Posted on June 23, 2015 by - News

Tcloudhe troubled Oracle outfit has just told its channel partners that it is extending its cloud offerings in a bid to improve its bottom line and see off competition from Amazon.

Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said in a webcast that he wanted to compete with Amazon.com on price.

This was after announcing that Oracle would offer online storage and capability for customers to run their applications entirely in Oracle’s cloud.

This is all pretty new for Oracle, which is shifting its traditional database and customer relationship management businesses to the cloud.

The only problem is that Amazon Web Services is the market leader, followed by Microsoft’s Azure service and Biggish Blue. Oracle is very late to the party which has gone on without it and reached the stage where people are either too drunk to speak or have coupled off.

Oracle has imaginatively dubbed its cloud platform Oracle Cloud Platform, will provide a cost-effective alternative to Amazon, said Ellison.

“Our new archive storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it’s one-tenth their price,” said Ellison.

Oracle’s cloud business is growing quickly, running at a rate of about $2.3 billion a year in revenue, based on last quarter’s figures. However the rest of the company is not doing so well and reported a surprise fall in profits.

Oracle unveils X5 with Intel Inside

Posted on January 22, 2015 by - News

Oracle-Announces-X5Oracle chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison unveiled X5, its fifth generation of Oracle’s engineered systems, to media and analysts at company headquarters on Wednesday afternoon.

Ellison introduced the company’s X5 as “the future of the datacentre” based on Intel Xeon® E5-2600 v3 processor family (Haswell-EP with up to 32 cores) and support for high bandwidth NVM Express (NVMe) flash drives.

The X5-2, a 1U two socket server, is designed and optimised for running Oracle Database in a clustered configuration. Optional four NVMe drives can be used to accelerate Database performace via Smart Flash Cache. This server is targeted at high-density vitualization environments.

The X5-2L, a 2U platform, is targeted for single-node databases and enterprise storage applications. The supports up to 758GB of memory, and configured for a maximum of 50.4TB of direct attached storage.

Also announced was Oracle’s NVM Express (NVMe) design providing up to 6.4TB of hot-swappable flash providing 2.5X the data rate of older SAS3 SSD interface drives using PCIe Gen3 Small Form Factor NVM SSD drives (12Gb/s vs. 32Gb/s). NVM Express flash technology is optimized to accelerate Oracle Database using a feature called Database Smart Flash Cache. This feature keeps recently accessed data warm in flash storage, reducing the chance that the database needs to fetch the data from slower magnetic media that may be direct attached or resident on a NAS/SAN fabric. In addition to the high-bandwidth interface to the NVM Express SSDs, the flash technology itself has been engineered to be high-endurance and write-optimized for Oracle Database.

Ellison’s new “vision” entails connecting datacentres efficiently and at lowest cost to the cloud – “There has to be some degree of compatibility between the public cloud and your private datacentre”, Ellison said.

Ellison emphasised Oracle’s “new strategy” using Intel processors to compete for the two-socket core business. The new “Virtual Compute Appliance X5” converged infrastructure system, consists of compute servers and software defined networking.

That integration comes in the form of th Virtual Compute Appliance X5 converged infrastructure system, consisting of compute servers, software-defined networking and Oracle designed hardware. Ellison went on to highlight the company’s abilities in software defined configuration of server and storage networks on VCA, supporting infiniband internal networking with external connectivity provided by Ethernet and Fibre Channel to link with existing networks.

Included within the X5 product portfolio are Oracle’s Big Data Appliance for Hadoop and NoSQL big data jobs and Exalogic X5-2 for private clouds.

Ellison described Oracles Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance capable of full data recovery with real-time “redo” transport and fully automated recovery functions, log re-examination with extraction of malicious transactions followed by re-entry of those processes again allows the appliance to be restored to any point in time.

Further the appliance, which can handle thousands of databases with backup connections to on-site datacentre, remote datacenters and cloud. “The big deal is it’s fully automated, so it’s easy to operate, and you never lose data. It’s a no brainer appliance as we have, “Ellison stated.

Ellison reminded the audience that “Oracle manufactures tests and supports all of these products in-house”, naming rivals Cisco, EMC, VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat hinting at more expensive and fragmented support by rivals. Further “One appliance alone can handle thousands of databases with potential backup connections to on-site datacentres, remote datacentres, and the cloud.” he said.

“The big deal is it’s fully automated, so it’s easy to operate, and you never lose data. It’s as a no-brainer appliance as we have,” Ellison remarked.

He further stressed Oracle has manufactured, tested, and support all these pieces in-house, calling out rivals Cisco, EMC, VMware, Microsoft, and Red Hat and hinting at more fragmented (not to mention expensive) deployment options. All X5 machines are available now.

TechEye Take

The rumor of the Intel invasion of Oracle has been circulating since OracleWorld 2012. This is a major shift for Oracle. The company’s management, currently in the midst of a “reinvention period”, includes the fact that Larry Ellison is executing a gradual accession plan as he moves toward retirement.

The X5 release is seen as one aspect of the company’s new strategy – one in which the company protects their private datacentre market base while adjusting to a world increasingly enveloped by the evolution of open hardware, software and the cloud. Ellison is a sharp toothed shark and Oracle is having a problem finding a way to replace his natural instincts – how this evolves is another one of those “only in the valley” stories.

It is looking like a very good year for Intel’s E5000 series though…,

 

Channel faces legal pitfalls after Oracle ruling

Posted on February 4, 2013 by - Opinions

courtThe final appeal is out and Oracle has lost its appeal against a Californian judge’s ruling that it will have to keep porting its software to Hewlett-Packard’s Itanium-based servers.

But as the cleaners clean the blood off the court room walls, it is clear that the case will have some impact on the way suppliers do business.

The case centred on the so-called Hurd Agreement, which HP and Oracle negotiated after Mark Hurd left the company and joined Oracle. Oracle felt that the agreement was a statement that the two companies would work together as they did before their spat. Oracle co-President Safra Catz claimed that such a statement was a non-binding “public hug”.

The judge thought that public hugs should be considered legally binding, depending on who was doing the hugging. He pointed out you can’t write down a phrase like “Oracle will continue to offer its product suite on HP platforms … in a manner consistent with that partnership as it existed prior to Oracle’s hiring of Hurd” and hope that no one would take you literally.

“The sentence can only be reasonably interpreted as requiring Oracle to continue offering its product suite on HP’s Itanium platforms,” Kleinberg wrote.

It went without saying Oracle appealed, but other judges also nodded sagely and said that it did not matter what Ellison thought he had signed, the agreement was there in black and white.
While the situation is extraordinary, it could herald a new era of partner agreements.

The case effectively said that any agreement has to be written down carefully and mulled over by the legal team before it is signed. It also says that anything put in writing has to be looked at as if it was chiseled into Egyptian granite for all time.

While this might seem obvious, it clearly was not in Oracle’s mind it has some of the most expensive, er, best, lawyers in the world.

Already analysts are muttering that you will never see another “public hug” deal like this again. Every agreement between suppliers will have a start date and an end date.

This is one of the reason why the channel should be dusting off their legal contracts with their suppliers post haste. Many of them will find that they have signed vague expressions of love and devotion which could get them in hot water.

Some of these contracts are like a pre-nuptial agreement, which are signed when the partners are in love and only reviewed when they are arguing custody over the CD collection.

Software deals in particular can be problematic, which are particularly ripe for a major legal row when something goes wrong for a mutual customer.

Fortunately a lot of lawyers have written in clauses into such for the contracts to be reviewed, or renewed. The problem is that if they are not renegotiated it is possible, as HP did, to stand up and demand it be taken literally.

The Itanium case also proved that trying to get out of a deal with bad grace might also backfire. Oracle really hates having to support Itanium, but if it assigned its worst developers to make sure the porting was stuffed, Ellison could be back in court facing a contempt charge.

Because the court has become involved, Oracle is painted into a corner and must be a dedicated follower of Itanium. Its ability to duck out of the plan is even more restricted than Intel or HP.

No company would ever want their partner to have that much power over their business decisions. So it is probably better to check out what those old contracts look like before you pick a fight with your channel partners.