The Oracle takeover of Sun has finally been approved by the EU, after a long delay while the EU competition folks had to discover that, in fact, MySQL wasn’t the only open source database on the planet. Shocking discovery, I know.
Oracle are holding a webcast next Wednesday 27th, where Mad Larry will be laying out his stalls and plotting the roadmap to world domination. You can sign up here – well worth a listen, if only because now Oracle are fully off the leash they’re free to really put the boot in to IBM and HP.
On a related note, I find Monty Widenius’ objections to the merger/takeover/sale bizarre. Sun paid the shareholders a cool $1 billion for MySQL AB – a ridiculous amount. They can do what they want with it. Surely if that caused you problems, you shouldn’t have sold it in the first place?
Selling something, then trying to force the new owners to let you have back control so you can build a competing commercial business off it – for free – is, quite frankly, greedy and deeply shady. And in the meantime, the delay has damaged Sun, their customers, partners – oh, and the career prospects of all those MySQL AB guys who now work for Sun. I’m sure Monty will be crying them all a river as he rolls around in the big stack of cash he got from Sun.
It’s a strange contrast to the behaviour of the Jboss folks, where after the sale the application server has been transformed via RedHat cash into a credible platform that’s met with some solid commercial success.
Over at the Sun HPC Watercooler there’s a great video from Acumen CTO Professor Erik Hagersten about how to migrate legacy code to multicore architectures, and how to optimise performance for parallel architectures.
Finding single core processors in servers is almost impossible now, and with processors like Sun’s UltraSPARC T2+ and NVidia’s GPU solutions, parallel processing (and the associated performance issues) are going to be a hot topic over the next few years.
The full video can be viewed here – well worth a watch.
DanT has posted up a fantastic introduction to Sun Grid Engine. Most discussions of Grid Engine assume a decent level of knowledge of clustering and distributed load balancing – fine if you know your stuff, not so good if you want to get up to speed with little prior knowledge.
Dan’s post breaks down the concepts behind Grid Engine and provides an excellent explanation on how and why it works. This is a really great resource and is well worth a read through – even if you’re not planning on deploying a Grid Engine solution, it’s well worth understanding the technology and how it works.
Alongside the recent SC09 show, Sun ran their HPC Consortium, which featured a number of interesting technical presentations from Sun and their customers. Obviously there was a big focus on using technologies within HPC, but discussions on things like file system roadmaps and how to scale performance with multi-chip hardware solutions are just as relevant to business as they are to HPC.
So it’s great to see that Sun have posted PDFs of the presentations, and videos of the discussion panels, up at the HPC Consortium website.
Head on over to https://meeting-reg.com/sunhpcc/presentations.php to get the full list.
There’s a lot of good content there and some very interesting discussions.
A couple of Sun blog posts that make excellent Friday reading. Sun are coming up with some great applications of Flash storage technology, and it’s gratifying to see this sort of “Mad Science” R&D resulting in some solid commercial solutions.
First up, Benoit Chaffanjon explores the Sun Flash Accelerator F20 cards, which are used inside the Sun Oracle Database Machine.
Next, Adam Leventhal explores the pros and cons of mirroring or striping Logzilla devices in the Sun Storage 7000s.
Both posts are a great read and give solid examples of the ways solid state storage can be exploited for some really big performance and scalability gains.
And, on a totally unrelated note, a loathsome technology that I have long had a hate-hate affair with, NIS+, has been removed from Solaris! Ironic that NIS+ has been outlived by NIS, the technology it was designed to replace.
