After receiving regulatory approval from the European Commission for its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc, Oracle last week announced that it had closed the deal, completing a process begun last spring. While the purchase had been held up by the European Commission's concerns that Oracle's ownership of the MySQL open source database, through the Sun acquisition, would have an adverse effect on competition, in a statement released by the commission, Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said, "I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned. Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products."
Oracle has hosted a webcast series on the "Oracle + Sun Product Strategy" highlighting Oracle's hardware, systems, software, solutions and partner strategies available on demand, and is also planning a series of in-person welcome events.
In one webcast showcasing the Oracle and Sun Exadata strategy, Juan Loaiza, senior vice president, Systems Technology, Oracle, notes the purpose of the Oracle acquisition of Sun is to produce a better product for customers. "What we are trying to do is produce integrated best in class products with more value and less complexity starting at the hardware level, up through the infrastructure, database, middleware, and applications. The Exadata is really an example of this integrated complete open strategy."
Version 2 of the Oracle Exadata introduced in 2009 in partnership with Sun, is tuned for OLTP in addition to data warehousing, and also now works with mixed workloads, says Loaiza. Loiza explains that the Sun Oracle Database Machine with Sun hardware and Oracle software is basically grid in a box. "We think that grid is the architecture of the future because it provides the highest performance at the lowest price with fault tolerance and it is scalable on demand."
Oracle has worked very closely with the Sun engineers to develop "an ideal configuration" for running databases, he states. "We believe and our customers are showing that this configuration, this Database Machine is a much more effective way to deploy an Oracle Database, much higher performance, lower cost, more highly available." There are three key benefits to a Database Machine, says Loaiza, and one of them is the Exadata storage server, and the second is new compression technologies, and the third key benefit is the way Oracle has integrated Flash technologies.
"Sun has jumped out ahead of most people by introducing a Flash card, ahead of most other vendors and it is a very effective Flash card," notes Loaiza, adding, "we can achieve tremendous performance off this."
And, on the software side, Oracle is innovating the way Flash is managed, Loaiza observes. "On the Database Machine, we have much more disk than Flash, and so we treat Flash as a cache in front of disks. The idea here is we want to get the performance of Flash with the cost of disk. Disk is very low cost, Flash is very high performance. We manage the data such that we can usually achieve the performance of Flash with the cost of disk."
To access this and other webcasts in the series outlining the Oracle and Sun strategy, go here.
Additionally, Oracle is also hosting a series of live Oracle + Sun Welcome Events in North America, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Europe, Middle East and Africa. Technology in the coming months, at which experts and customer service executives will provide insight into Oracle's strategy on topics such as: Oracle + Sun Strategy Update: Software. Hardware. Complete; Oracle's Sun Hardware Strategy: Servers, Storage and Networking; Solaris and the Oracle Virtualization Portfolio; Managing Physical and Virtual Sun Systems; and Engaging with Oracle-Sales, Services and Partnerships.