Despite Ellison Remark, Oracle Still a Fan of X86

It can't be easy working for Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Just ask John Fowler, the head of Oracle's systems business, who's spent the past two weeks trying to convince customers that Ellison didn't really mean it when he said Oracle is "phasing out" its x86 business.

"Larry made some rather 'interesting' comments about Intel, that he doesn't care a lot about the Intel server business," Fowler said in a speech at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco on Tuesday. "That, of course, led to a lot of calls to my office."

It's easy to see how the confusion arose: "I don't care if our commodity x86 business goes to zero," Ellison brashly declared on Oracle's quarterly earnings call last month. "We don't make any money selling those things."

Oracle has "no interest" in selling other companies' intellectual property, such as Intel's chips and Microsoft's OS, he said. "Sun sold that stuff, and we are phasing out that business. We have no interest in it whatsoever."

But "commodity" was the key word, according to Fowler. Oracle will continue to make x86 servers and use them as building blocks in larger systems, such as its Exadata Database Machine.

"We see Intel as a key building block to whole families of systems," Fowler said Tuesday, trying to set the record straight. "What we aren't focused on is the large-scale x86 server business running, for example, the Windows OS. Our value is around enterprise computing."

Ellison isn't the only CEO sending mixed messages. Fowler was preceded on stage by Michael Dell, who declared that "Dell is not a PC company," then went on to extol the benefits of Dell being in the PC business.

Dell is an "end-to-end solutions company," Dell said, meaning it too can sell integrated systems that combine hardware and software, through acquisitions of companies like Compellent, Boomi and SecureWorks. Dell is buying companies at a rate of eight per year, Michael Dell said.

But he also took a shot at Hewlett-Packard's decision to sell or spin off its PC business. The move would cause HP to lose its purchasing heft and wind up paying more for components like microprocessors and disks, Dell said, which it would still need to build servers.

"If you give up that scale you go from being one of the largest suppliers in the world to being not even in the top five," he said. "That creates huge problems; the price of those components goes up."

Amid a lengthy sales pitch for his company, Michael Dell shared one bit of news: In the first quarter next year, Dell will introduce its 12th generation of PowerEdge servers with a memory virtualization technology from RNA Networks, a small company it acquired earlier this year with little fanfare.

The technology will allow Dell to build bigger servers that combine 1,024 processor cores and more than 40TB of memory in a single rack, he said. "Imagine you have a data center with 10 server racks. Now imagine consolidating that to one rack," he said.

The new systems will also make greater use of flash memory, putting it as close to the CPUs as possible to create "tier zero" storage, Dell said. As flash gets cheaper and more dense, server makers are using it to store frequently accessed data instead of hard disk drives, boosting performance.

"The result is 60x faster queries" on the new PowerEdge systems, according to Dell.

James Niccolai covers data centers and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow James on Twitter at @jniccolai. James's e-mail address is james_niccolai@idg.com

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Oracle Further Commercializes MySQL Database

Oracle has added additional commercial extensions to the enterprise edition of its open-source MySQL database, further differentiating it from the community version available to anyone at no charge.

A new thread pooling capability can provide a "significant" performance and scalability boost for "applications that service a high number of concurrent connections, specifically on 16-core and higher systems," according to an official blog post this week.

Enterprise Edition subscriptions now also include an Oracle VM template for quickly deploying databases; support for Windows Server Failover Clustering; and various authentication improvements.

The features, which join existing MySQL commercial extensions such as Enterprise Monitor, are available to current Enterprise Edition subscription holders now. They will be made available as part of a 30-day free trial "shortly," according to the post.

Oracle's handling of MySQL has been closely watched by community members who use and help develop the database, which it acquired through the purchase of Sun Microsystems in 2010. The Sun deal was held up while European antitrust authorities mulled the implications of what Oracle, which sells the industry's most widely used proprietary database, would do to MySQL.

Ultimately, Oracle issued a set of public pledges affirming its commitment to keeping MySQL open and viable, and has since delivered a number of significant updates to MySQL.

Its decision to limit the new premium extensions to Enterprise Edition customers and not include them in the community code is a common practice among commercial open source companies, but the move could still anger some users.

Database expert Guiseppe Maxia, a former lead of the MySQL community team, does not fall into that group.

"An open source product needs to be developed. And the developers need to get paid. Ergo, the company needs to make money from that product if it wants to continue developing it," he wrote in a blog post on Friday. "Either that, or the company needs to sell something else to pay the bills."

"Let's not get into the argument that a pure open source project with universal participation is better, faster, or more marvelous," he added. "MySQL was never that, not with Oracle, not with Sun, and not when it was an independent company."

Enterprise Edition subscriptions cost US$5,000 per year per server with up to four sockets.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

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Oracle Quadruples Capacity of Virtualization Software

Oracle has updated its server virtualization software with greater policy control and more connectors for storage systems, the company announced Tuesday.

The newly released Oracle VM 3.0 will feature "enhancements that are aimed to make it more scalable in terms of performance and management," said Adam Hawley, Oracle senior director of product management for Oracle VM.

Chief among those enhancements are new policy controls, better support for third-party storage management and the ability to run more virtual machines per server.

Based on the open source Xen hypervisor, Oracle VM is Oracle's x86 server virtualization software, one customized for running other Oracle software products. The codebase comes from Oracle's acquisition of Virtual Iron in 2009. Oracle offers 90 templates for running other Oracle enterprise software, such as PeopleSoft, on Oracle VM. Users can also deploy Oracle VM as a Linux-based stand-alone virtualization manager, as an alternative to other products such as VMware's vSphere.

"Virtualization is moving beyond being a tool for server consolidation to become an enabler for application management," said Monica Kumar, Oracle senior director virtualization marketing.

Oracle VM can now support up to 128 virtual CPUs per server. The previous version, version 2.2, could only run 32 virtual CPUs per server. By way of comparison, VMware's recently released vSphere 5 can support 32 virtual CPUs. Both Oracle VM and vSphere can support up to 1 terabyte of memory per virtual machine.

Oracle VM 3.0's new capabilities in policy management allow administrators to script events to take place whenever some trigger condition is reached, Hawley explained. For example, live virtual machines can be automatically moved from one server to another whenever CPU usage or network traffic reaches a critical threshold. Or, workloads can be consolidated on fewer servers for times of slow usage, which can save energy.

With this release, Oracle also introduces a storage connect framework, which should give virtualization managers greater control over back-end storage systems, Hawley said. Administrators "can use storage features from our management interface, so they don't have to use multiple tools," Hawley said.

Previous versions of the product offered basic storage accessibility, while the new version permits access to advanced vendor specific features, such as virtual machine cloning or snapshotting, in which a copy of a virtual machine is saved at a pre-defined time. Oracle has specific plug-ins for storage vendor products from EMC, NetApp, Fujitsu, Hitachi, as well as Oracle's own storage systems.

Oracle VM, and associated support, is free for existing customers of Oracle's x86 system customers.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com

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