OSNews

You need to quit talking about "StorageTek". StorageTek is a brand now, and only a brand of part of Sun's Data Storage products. You also need to get a grasp of enterprise reality. Storage demands are growing at a phenomenal rate, and companies with good storage lines are going to see huge growth. Yes, Oracle might want to jettison the tape products, but the storage arrays, the new Unified Storage Systems, and the Thumper Storage Server can be huge products with the right marketing. Also, the Magnum (Sun 3456 Datacenter Switch) and the 3x24 switch could be very successful products in the Infiniband space, except hardly anyone has ever heard of them (after Schwartz's one blog about the Magnum).



Working for a Fortune 50 company, you should know that your company loves to have support contracts so that it can at least claim to have someone to fix problems when they show up. Your Fortune 50 company is not going to go use the OpenSource version of MySQL without a support contract. If Oracle can keep you from going away completely, by supplying you a support contract for MySQL, they still have a revenue stream and a foot in the door for the databases that need more horsepower than MySQL can provide. If you're already using an Oracle product, you are less likely to go talk to IBM about DB2, especially if Oracle can provide you a unified management system across all levels.



Awful healthy looking corpse, if you ask me. Since you combined two different things here, let's break them up.

Solaris: open source operating system that Oracle will have complete control over. They will be able to push the database down deeper and deeper into the OS and create the absolute best linkage possible. They've been wanting to turn the database into an OS, you can see that from the direct hardware access and the HA that they've been building into ASM, OCFS2, and RAC. Now, they've got that basis, and its a basis that is well known and still heavily used in the marketplace. Solaris may have been loosing marketshare, but it is still huge. As for who would want to support their own OS... how about IBM (several), HP (a couple), MicroSoft (too many), as well as dozens of other companies that support their own OSes.

SPARC: Traditional SPARC architecture is not very good in comparison to commodity, but the T-series and the upcoming RK-series are designed for high throughput, which is perfect for the Oracle workload, specifically horizontal scalability with RAC. What a great architecture for Oracle to base an appliance on.



Quick, someone tell IBM and HP, who have both proprietary hardware and OS platforms. Tell Apple, who although they have moved to some commodity hardware are still charging a premium, and getting it on top of their proprietary OS. Which strangely, the Linux crowd seems to love....




ZFS is revolutionary. And, combined with existing Oracle technologies, such as ASM and OCFS, can be even more revolutionary. Tie that with RAC, and database clusters suddenly become easy and great.




Ah, I see you're a GNU person. Sun (and ZFS) is already very "open source" friendly, they just aren't particularly GNU friendly. There is more to open source than the GPL.



The wonderful thing about owning a technology, even if it is open sourced, is that you can control its market. If you control it in such a way that people really don't like it, then with opensource, the market will go away and become "technology-NG", but if you aren't completely onerous, you'll keep your market, no matter what opensource is out there. Oracle will own "Java" and will be able to dictate what "Java" becomes. If you don't like it, you can create your own JVM or your own language, but you can't call it Java, and if you want the world to use it, you have to convince them to leave "Java" and use something else.