Oracle and SUN Archive

Now that Hewlett-Packard appears to be a little tipsy, not really knowing where it is and what it's doing, Reuters is reporting that the company is working on selling its webOS operating system. HP acquired webOS as part of its purchase of Palm, made a big fuss about the whole thing, and then let it fizzle out. The company rumoured buy webOS? Oracle.

"Oracle has pulled the rug out from under Intel's Itanium processor by yanking support of its database, middleware, and application software on future Poulson and Kittson Itaniums. It looks as though Larry Ellison wants to take on IBM in microprocessors for data center systems, man to man, head to head. 'I remember when we first bought Sun, a lot of people said we were going to get out of the hardware business," Oracle's co-founder and CEO said opening up his keynote at the OpenWorld customer and partner and conference on Sunday night, when he also announced the new Exalytics in-memory BI appliance. 'I guess we didn't get that memo,' Ellison quipped, pointing out that Apple is doing a 'pretty good job' designing its own hardware and software and making it work well with its own services. And that Oracle is not only committed to making its server, storage, and networking business work, but having taken Sun's hardware as a means of getting its hands on Solaris and Java, Oracle is actually enthusiastic about creating its own stack."

Oracle VM VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop computers to run multiple operating systems simultaneously, and supports a variety of host operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, most popular flavors of Linux (including Oracle Linux), and Oracle Solaris. Version 4.0 delivers increased capacity and throughput to handle greater workloads, enhanced virtual appliance capabilities, and significant usability improvements. Support for the latest in virtual hardware, including chipsets supporting PCI Express, further extends the value delivered to customers, partners and developers.

"Oracle on Wednesday announced the availability of Cloud Office 1.0, a Web-based productivity suite that is set to give online applications from Microsoft and Google a fresh dose of competition. Cloud Office is integrated with the on-premises Oracle Open Office, of which version 3.3 was also announced Wednesday. Like Open Office, Cloud Office is based on ODF (Open Document Format). It provides a set of spreadsheet, text and presentation applications and is compatible with Microsoft Office, according to Oracle."

Oracle executives talked up on Thursday the planned Solaris 11 release due in 2011, with the Unix OS upgrade offering advancements in availability, security, and virtualization. The OS will feature next-generation networking capabilities for scalability and performance, said John Fowler, Oracle executive vice president of systems, at a company event in Santa Clara, Calif. "It's a complete reworking of enterprise OS," he said. Oracle took over Solaris when the company acquired Sun Microsystems early this year.

Today Oracle released its latest version of Solaris technology, the Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 release. It includes a large number of new features not found in either Oracle Solaris 10 or previous OpenSolaris releases including ZFS encryption and deduplication, network-based packaging and provisioning systems, network virtualization, optimized I/O for NUMA platforms and optimized platform support including support for Intel's latest Nehalem and SPARC T3. In addition, Oracle Solaris 10 support is available from within a container/zone so migration of existing systems is greatly simplified. The release is available under a variety of licenses including a supported commercial license on a wide variety of x86 and SPARC platforms.

Sometimes, Google's search engine does a better job of telling us about IT vendors than the vendors' own public relations and marketing machines, which are often there mostly to deflect questions rather than answer them. So it is with the next commercial and development iterations of Oracle's Solaris Unix operating system.

"Xandros is based, like Ubuntu, on Debian GNU/Linux, the ultimate community distribution of Linux, but lives by a very different ethos. Xandros has moved at its own pace, offering solutions from desktop to server, with the objective of 'selling Linux into a Windows world'. The latest release of the Xandros Linux desktop edition was in June 2006, which is several lifetimes in the history of Linux. Is this the end of the line for the Xandros desktop?" Hey, we even have a Xandros database category. Darn, we're awesome.

Microsoft's server and tools chief Bob Muglia has chided Oracle for peddling a return to '1960s computing', accusing its rival of going against industry trends and backing a dying and expensive operating-system architecture. "There are some things that Oracle is doing that I just shake my head at," Muglia told financial analysts attending the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, California, "I don't understand what's going to happen - what they think they're going to do with Sparc. I don't see how Sparc can live long-term."

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, an advocate of Web 2.0, used Twitter early Thursday to announce his resignation. He was named CEO in 2006 as Sun faced a switch in strategic direction away from proprietary systems and toward open source code, including its valued Solaris 10 operating system. "Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it", he said in a tweet to his followers, reported the New York Times on its Web site at 1:12 a.m. Thursday. He added a bit of haiku: "Financial crisis, Stalled too many customers, CEO no more."

"It's official: the European Commission has granted regulatory approval for Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems for approximately USD 7.4 billion, without further conditions. In a statement released moments ago, Oracle says it expects unconditional approval from China and Russia as well and intends to close the transaction shortly."

Yesterday (today if you're in the US), Sun released the latest version of its virtualisation solution, VirtualBox 3.1. Among speed improvements and other smaller features, the biggest news is that Virtualox 3.1 introduces something called teleportation: you can move running VMs between machines - servers or clients, different architectures, different host operating systems, it doesn't matter to VirtualBox. Coincidentally, this reminded me of an idea I once had about moving running applications between machines.

When the news broke that Oracle wanted to buy Sun, a number of eyebrows were raised over what would happen to Sun's open source portfolio. While the US Department of Justice gave the green light for the deal to go through, the European Commission was among the eye brows raising crowd, and they were quite worried about the future of specifically MySQL.

There we are! It took them a while, but Oracle has finally said a few things about the future of Sun's SPARC and Solaris products. Oracle placed an ad in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal listing four plans the company has with SPARC and Solaris.