Oracle CEO
and co-founder, America's Cup enthusiast, serial entrepreneur and
multibillionaire Larry Ellison has never been afraid of expressing himself. He
proved it again Jan. 27 at the Oracle+Sun
Microsystems road map and strategy event on the Oracle campus.
During his hourlong series of remarks about the inclusion of Sun in Oracle's
domain, the state of the IT database and data center market, and his interest
in buying the Golden State Warriors, Ellison threw several rhetorical spears at
Oracle's biggest competitor and role model, IBM.
Of course, Ellison is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution,
which states—among other things—that Congress shall enact no law impinging upon
freedom of speech. Thus, like millions of other U.S.
citizens, Ellison is free to express whatever opinions he has on any topic.
However, unlike most citizens, he is a legitimate public figure and newsmaker,
and members of the media tend to take note of what he has to say.
Whether everything he says is completely objective is often a point of
discussion, to put it mildly. IBM, for one,
wasn't impressed with Ellison's remarks about its data center
products—especially about its front-line enterprise database, DB2.
"Someone said they should have called his routine 'Larry the Fable Guy,'"
Bernie Spang, IBM's director of product
strategy, told eWEEK in a play on words about a second-tier comedian who
purports to be a cable TV technician. "I can't believe some of the
stupid—and ignorant—things he said."
Here are some of the statements about IBM
that Ellison made before a full house of about 500 people and an undoubtedly
large Webcast audience, followed by IBM's
(via Spang) reaction to each:
Ellison: "IBM DB2 is good on
mainframes, the best in the world. Oracle is good on everything else—x86 and
all others. It's too bad DB2 can't run on modern machines. Can't scale either—the
most [instances] you can have of DB2 is one."
Spang: "DB2 demonstrated in
benchmarks and customer situations that it can scale up to 100 nodes as far
back as 1995. That's on Unix systems. Last year, in December '09, we introduced
a new capability called PureScale. That demonstrates scaling out on our Power
systems; scaling out to 128 members is what we've demonstrated in the lab. It's
new, so we don't have customer stories yet.
"We've talked publicly about the fact that at 64 nodes, we have 95 percent
scalability—or efficiency—in the system [meaning 5 percent of throughput is
used for system overhead, the rest for handling workloads]. Even up at 128
nodes, 84 percent [efficiency]. Oracle has never published such numbers for
their Real Application [Testing] product.
"[This is probably] because there is a profound difference in the amount
of system overhead [needed] to run Oracle
RAC [Real Application Clusters] versus running our new DB2 PureScale, which
is based on the same design of DB2 on the mainframe, on System z."
Ellison: "I can't understand why IBM has never come out with a
database machine. DB2 doesn't cluster, doesn't scale, nothing. You cannot run
an OLTP [online transaction processing] application on DB2, because it doesn't
scale."
Spang: "Let's talk about the TPC-C
[Transaction Processing Performance Council] benchmark. Over the last seven
years, DB2 has been in the leadership position about twice as long as Oracle.
This game with benchmarks is a leapfrog game. Companies use the latest hardware,
[the results improve] and it depends on point in time. What really matters is
looking over a period of time for the consistency in the leadership position.
So seven years, about twice as many days in the leadership position [over
Oracle].
"I'll give you another one close to a real-world situation: In the
three-tiered SAP benchmark, DB2 [on Power systems] has held the record there
for almost five years now, doing more than 50 million SAP steps per hour.
"Let's talk about the SAP apps themselves. Just last year we announced
that more than 100 companies had switched from Oracle to DB2 to power their SAP
applications. The stories we hear are: better performance—in the range of 20
percent better—while reducing costs 30 to 40 percent. Coca-Cola Bottling was
one that was quoted back then, talking about migrating from Sun servers to
Power systems. It just made sense to them from a money point of view.
"Larry also said something else: That the [recent] uncertainty about Sun
systems was just a blip [due to the acquisition process]. Well, Coca-Cola
pointed out that they have been switching from Sun to Power systems over a
number of years.
"I would argue that the uncertainty about Sun systems versus IBM
accelerated a trend, and frankly, the uncertainty remains."
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