As Program Director for database software at IBM, I closely track my primary competitors. Its only natural that I would. And when the occasion warrants it, I provide my perspective on Oracle claims. I think its healthy for both sides of any story to be told. In this specific instance, I found these developments to be interesting, and I knew that many readers of this blog would too.

I agree that we will have to wait until the end of the fiscal year to see if Oracle hit their revised estimates. Who knows, they may even exceed them. We’ll see in a few months. But nonetheless, I still think it interesting to see the significant downward trend in expectation-setting by Ellison and Oracle. Perhaps they are reacting to their recent poor financial reportings, and playing it safe with their expectation setting. Again, we’ll see soon.

If we want to cut through the noise being made on earnings calls and the obtuse references to “sales” and “installations”, we should probably look at server share as reported by independent third party analyst firms.

Regards,
Conor.

But, here, you are mixing actuals versus predictions/forecasts. As you state “In June of last year, during Oracle’s FYQ4 2011 earnings call, Larry Ellison claimed that Oracle expect more than 2,000 Exadata systems to be installed in fiscal year 2012″. Well, FY2012 isn’t over yet so you’ll have to see whats reported after May 2012.

Till then, its all speculation and not worth the grains of salt remaining on the table. What I find more interesting is that while Oracle is indeed showing great growth on Exadata/ Exalogic / SPARC SuperCluster, theres no reports from IBM to the contrary. So how are those Netezza, Power 795 or Watson sales going? And last I saw, IBM didn’t do so well on Mainframes during Q4 with a 31% drop in revenue http://bit.ly/Ako0Z7. Not a good sign when Q4 is IBM’s strongest quarter.

http://www.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/benchmarks
http://benchmarkingblog.wordpress.com/

Wonder what the rest of the vendors have.

Most of the benchmarks do not provide you with any indication of TCA, TCO, reliability, up-time and so on. And, as far as I know, POWER is one of the few that actually use server virtualization as part of their benchmarking process. In today’s environment, server virtualization should be considered a key component of any benchmark that is submitted.

Something that I think is a more important and distinguishing difference between x86, SPARC, Itanium, POWER and the z Architecture actually comes from HP’s Odyssey announcement http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/solutions/mcci/index.html. If you read between the lines, HP is saying that x86, Windows on x86 and Linux on x86 are not mission critical, do not have the RAS required to run a business and cannot meet business required SLA’s in their current state.

When I read the announcement, I was just shaking my head. Ouch to trusted partners Microsoft, Red Hat and Intel.

The IBM configuration focused their spending on the servers, whereas the Cisco/Oracle configuration focused their spending on the storage. And the difference is huge. When I get some time, I must dig a little deeper into this to understand the system characteristics…

Once you analyze the FDR you will realize that statement is not as true as you would first be led to believe. TPC breaks pricing into “server” and “storage” but if the storage is actually internal it falls into the “server” pricing, if it is external then it falls into the “storage” category. In the IBM case the SSDs were part of the “server” category since they are in the I/O Drawers, whereas the Cisco/Oracle result they used Violin storage which falls into the “external” category.