Posted 11/18/09 at 07:03:26 AM by Paul Lilly

While Oracle's been busy trying to win the blessing of the European Union in its attempted takeover deal with Sun Microsystems, Sun has been focusing on upping its storage ante, The company on Tuesday announced upgrades to its Sun Storage 7000 family of disk arrays that purports to double both the performance and capacity from a maximum of 288TB to 576TB in a 4U space.

Sun said it outfitted its Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System with four six-core AMD Opteron processors, double the amount of DRAM cache as before (up to 512GB), and new 2TB capacity drives. The end result is significantly improved performance, the company claims.

"Sun server, storage, and networking contniue to fuel world record HPC performance and provide the building blocks for dozens of new Sun Constellation System deployments around the globe," said John Fowler, executive vice president, System Group, Sun. "Corporations and scientists alike are using Sun server and storage innovation to gain competitive advantage and tackle the world's most complex problems."

In addition to storage upgrades, Sun also announced a pair of InfiniBand switches, the Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 72 and Switch 36.

More details and specs here.

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Posted 11/10/09 at 07:07:11 AM by Paul Lilly

Coming as a surprise to absolutely no one, the European Union on Monday formally objected to Oracle's proposed takeover of Sun. The EU's hard stance could throw a wrench in the $7.4 billion deal that had already been approved by U.S. officials.

The sole sticking point for the EU is that the deal would give Oracle control over Sun's free MySQL database software. Because Oracle sells its own database software, the EU fears the company would purposely hamstring MySQL in order to boost its own sales.

"The Commission's Statement of Objections reveals a profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics," Oracle said in response to the objection. "It is well understood by those knowledgeable about open source software that because MykSQL is open source, it cannot be controlled by anyone. That is the whole point of open source."

Oracle will have an opportunity to respond to the EU's objections before it makes its final ruling on the deal by January 19. Even then, should the EU outright reject the deal, Oracle could file an appeal. The alternative is to back out of the acquisitionl, which would cost Oracle a $260 million breakup fee, the Wall Street Journal reports.

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Posted 11/04/09 at 08:08:25 AM by Paul Lilly

Oracle knows it's in for a fight with the European Union over the U.S. company's planned $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems, but appears ready to go the rounds, according to a Financial Times report.

The EU is mainly concerned about whay Oracle might end up doing with Sun's MySQL code base, such as killing it off or dropping support in order to push its own non-free database package. And according to FT.com, one person close to the process says the EU is ever-so-close to issuing an official statement of objection, which is step one in blocking the deal.

It's unlikely Oracle will back down, choosing instead to wait and see what the EU decides. Should the Commission object, Oracle could choose to offer concessions or take its fight to court.

The Sun acquisition has already been given the green light by the U.S. Department of Justice.

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Posted 10/30/09 at 08:03:47 AM by Paul Lilly

According to IBM, some 235 former Sun and HP customers moved their critical business workloads to IBM servers and storage systems in the third quarter. And in the past three years since IBM first established its Migration Factory program specifically for this purpose, Big Blue has been able to convince nearly 2,000 customers to make the switch, most of which have come from rivals Sun and HP.

Perhaps weary of what the future holds once Oracle's acquisition of Sun is complete, 84 Sun clients made the move to IBM Power Systems in the third quarter alone. According to IBM, it's the company's long-term investments in systems and consistent roadmaps that have been the biggest draws.

Speaking of Power Systems, IBM gained five share points in the third quarter, which is the sixth consecutive quarter of share gains. System x systems gained two points, while IBM storage went up an unspecified amount in the third quarter.

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Posted 10/27/09 at 04:30:00 AM by Paul Lilly

One of the challenges facing Oracle in its $7.4 billion takeover bid of Sun Microsystems is in convincing the European Commission that it plans to devote just as much attention to the free, open-source MySQL database as it will on any of its own costlier parallel database products. So far Oracle has a hard time convincing the EC of that, so should Oracle drop MySQL altogether? Former MYSQL business adviser Florian Mueller seems to think so.

Mueller isn't alone, either. Members of the EC feel that owning MySQL through the acquisition of Sun presents a huge conflict of interest for Oracle, who is poised to become the owner of its biggest open-source competitor.

"Oracle is a high-priced cash cow in the parallel database business," Mueller said during a press conference on Monday. "Why then should it be the one entity that controls development, determines revenues, and controls an R&D budget of a competing product that it sells against directly in the database market?"

Naturally, Oracle has a different perspective. According to Oracle CEO and founder Larry Ellison, MySQL isn't a competitor at all, and he points out MySQL has its own market and following. Instead, Ellison says Microsoft SQL Server is Oracle's competition.

But no matter how Ellison feels, it's the EC who has the final word, at least in Europe. Without the EC's stamp of approval, Oracle won't be able to do business in Europe. As it stands, the EC has set a deadline of January 19, 2010 to make a final decision to sanction the deal or not, although it could decide even sooner.

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Posted 10/21/09 at 12:25:08 PM by Paul Lilly

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, Sun revealed it plans to eliminate up to 3,000 jobs, or about 10 percent of its global workforce, ZDNet Asia reports.

This marks the second major round of job cuts in a year for Sun, who last November announced plans to reduce its workforce by up to 6,000 jobs, or 18 percent of its global staff, in a major restructuring effort. Those cuts were already disclosed by the time Oracle announced its $7.4 billion takeover bid for the struggling server maker.

As the Oracle deal sits in limbo awaiting approval from the European Commission things could get even worse for Sun.

"Sun is losing $100 million a month, we'd like to get this thing done," Larry Ellison, CEO for Oracle, said at an industry gathering in Silicon Valley last month.

Oracle has so far remained quiet about the latest round of job cuts taking place at Sun.

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Posted 08/21/09 at 08:55:35 AM by Paul Lilly

Oracle, which makes databases and other software, said the U.S. Department of Jusice has approved its plans to acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion.

The bid to acquire Sun was first announced in April and Sun shareholders approved the acquisition on July 16, but the deal has been in limbo following the DOJ's extended antitrust review. According to a lawyer for Oracle, the DOJ needed more time to review an issue about the way rights to Java are licensed, the Wall Street Journal reports.

With the DOJ no longer a roadblock, Oracle still faces a few more hurdles before the deal can go through. The acquisition is subject to certain conditions and also needs approval from European regulators, which said it will weigh in with an initial opinion in September.

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Posted 06/18/09 at 02:57:59 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Sun spent the past five years touting its Rock chip project. The Rock project has only yielded delays till now and the much vaunted UltraSparc server chip with multiple cores is still nowhere to be seen. But according to an unconfirmed report, which quotes sources privy to the sensitive details of the project, Sun has finally decided to cancel the Rock chip project. Sun had time and again claimed that the 16-core UltraSparc chip would turn the tide in its favor in the high-end server chip segment. One popular belief is that Oracle, which will soon acquire Sun, may have ordered the cancellation. The cancellation will help Sun trim its R&D budget.

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