Monday 12 October 2009

Open World Update #1 - Boys and their Toys

Oracle Open World 2009 was opened last night by a presentation from Scott McNealey, the - still - current CEO of SUN. As always, Scott has a free style of presenting, laced with a lot of humour. I got a sad feeling from him, as these are his last days as SUN CEO. One time he mentioned: this will probably the last time for a while that I'm able to present for such a large crowd. However, there was also a lot of pride in what was achieved during his 26 years at Sun.

As was to be expected, Larry Ellison entered the stage as well, to fend off the IBM attack. Boy, is it going to be a clash of titans. Oracle has really blown away IBM's world record TPC-C benchmark. And how! The new Sun Exadata Database machine, coupled with the new T5100 Flashfire is not only 20% faster, but - more impressively - has 16x better response times, while using a fraction of the energy (Green is HOT!): 300 watts versus 40.000 watts!

But really, it felt like the boys were loose, running in the yard playing with their toys. It sets a tone of what to expect in the next few months. IBM played it hard and got clobbered in the first round. Not the end of the war though!

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