First up at 8:30 sharp was Charles Schwarz. He picked up, like everyone else this week, the common theme of eco-responsibility. Interesting point that the cost of powering a server has now outstripped the cost of buying it. So that means that all of the big boys are looking at how they can engage with the green agenda and make energy efficiency savings. And, of course, they are all desperately trying to stake a claim to being the first or the only or the best in terms of how they are approaching the problem.
Virtualisation came up again with Charles Schwarz announcing Sun's (did you know that SUN stands for Stanford University Network? No, neither did I) vmx platform. Being Sun, its roots are firmly in the open source community and the XEN project. It's interesting to see Sun's strategy for growing its business. Rather than trying to sell products directly, it stimulates overall demand by releasing free technologies that ultimately lead to more hardware sales. Charles Schwarz gave the example of java. It's the development platform of choice, of course, and can be found on 90% of the world's PCs along with 6 billion mobile devices. Wow.
So Sun has made its pitch in the virtualisation market with a number of interesting products:
- the ultrasparc T2 CPU which is optimised for virtualisation and can 'run' 64 operating systems on a single CPU
- a new VM engine and management console
- a new storage virtualisation project (ZFS) based around the use of commodity storage. This one looks worth keeping an eye on
The VM engine - or Hypervisor as I suppose we should call it - is available at http://www.openxvm.org/
Sun also impressed by being one of the vendors with sufficient courage to undertake a live demo. And it worked. Nearly.
Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, on came surprise guest Michael Dell (more of him later) to announce a partnership with Sun. So you can now buy Dell boxes loaded with Solaris.
Another interesting theme this week has been the constant references to social networking tools. Almost all of the big boys have included Facebook type technologies in their latest product releases. Great. Now you can see the CFO out drunk with all his pals in Oracle Financials.
After lunch, it was Michael Dell's turn. He told us how Dell was doing all it could to fight climate change and made a commitment to be carbon neutral by 2008. As predicted it was all about virtualisation and server cooling efficiency. A bit too much of a Dell commercial but a good session.
Interesting things to see too. Dell now have an online facility where you can load up a machine image and get Dell to build you as many boxes as you want with that image.
Also got a demo of a yet-to-be-released tablet featuring multi-touch technology. Think touch screen and being able to use all your fingers at once. You had to be there.
Last of all, there was a demo of desktop streaming technology. A kind of cross between thin client and a PC, you have a diskless workstation which pulls its OS image from a server. But as it still has CPU etc in the case it can handle processor intensive operations like video in the same way as a normal PC. Quite good that was.
We then had a last plug outlining Dell's green credentials again. I suppose it is worth mentioning that they do offer free recycling of Dell products to consumers. Others take note.
Last keynote was Larry Ellison. He was in bullish mood and keen to tell us how Oracle can solve all your problems and be green while doing it.
Yet again, we had mention of virtualisation with the launch of Oracle VM. It's free to download and has lots of VM templates so worth a look. If you want support it's about £1k per annum for 4 CPUs. clearly aimed at taking a slice of VMWare's market share. It's also certified against all Oracle apps. I had a long talk with the guy who leads the development team yesterday and he was very excited about its capabilities. It is definitely something I will be looking at when I get back.
There was also a strong pitch about unbreakable Linux. According to Larry, Oracle has just taken Red Hat and fixed all the bugs. You can even switch your support (effortlessly) from Red Hat. Hmmm.
We then had a demo of some new Fusion applications which were interesting enough but sales force automation doesn't really butter my toast so I had a metaphorical snooze.
Larry was then back up for some Q&A. Nothing new or particularly interesting until someone asked him about licensing (no, it wasn't me). He said something along the following lines:
Oracle's preference is not for named user or processor based licensing. We would rather sit down with customers and work out a deal that allowed them to use what they needed. It doesn't matter if you are a small or large business. Just go talk to your sales people.
Now that is not a direct quote - I was actually too stunned to write it down - but it's close enough and Gavin was sitting beside me and he heard it too. This is something we will certainly be speaking to Oracle about in the very near future.
Reeling from this (I suspect a few Oracle sales guys were too) we headed off for a final session on Oracle Web Services Manager. As I suspected, this looks like something we need to give serious consideration to.
In short, it is a J2EE app which controls and manages web services. It can do cool things like:
- add ws-security to plain SOAP messages
- manage many and multiple endpoints
- enforce different security policies at runtime
- monitor web services and report on e.g. SLA breaches such as delayed messages
And tomorrow the adventure is over and we come home.
No comments:
Post a Comment