New SPARC Cluster Is Oracle's Challenge For HP And IBM

“We’re going to win marketshare against those guys — in the database business, the middleware business, the server business and the storage business, because we have better products.”

However, now that Oracle is in the data centre hardware, software and services businesses – as well as the supercomputing business – with all of its Sun properties, that relationship with HP has become very strained, to say the least. Suffice to say that Oracle is not co-selling into large accounts anymore with HP providing its servers, storage, networking and services.

The conference

Oracle’s primary purpose at the conference was to announce a new Exalogic cloud computing system, powered by SPARC chips and running Solaris, to go alongside its Intel x86 version, demonstrated at OracleWorld in September.

“The mission-critical IT world still runs on Unix and Linux and Java: 10 of the top 10 banks, 10 of the top 10 telcos, and lots of others. SPARC Solaris and Java are still number one, as far as we can tell. 70 to 80 percent of our [database and server] business is Solaris and Linux-based, and we’re number two on both Windows and on IBM mainframes,” he boasted.