Pythian Group

So, a quick update on the Pythian/Oracle partnership, and what it’s like to be an OPN Platinum partner.

So far, it’s been really worthwhile.

Oracle actually sent us our very first actual real lead. We’ve been an OPN partner for a decade and we’d never gotten an actual lead before. But this one is a real one, an email made it’s way to us with the subject “OPN Solutions Catalog Message – Request for Information” and sure enough, inside was the full contact information for a prospective ISV partner who is looking for a collaborator to launch a managed service to their customers for operations support on their data-intensive systems. AMAZING!

And, I must say, the OPN group at Oracle are really a class act and know how to get a partner excited about working with them. In the mail today, we received a very nice box and in an unboxing moment that beats the iPhone or Nexus One … well it had no ninjas but it did have a beautiful magnet-latch lid! Inside was a lovely OPN Platinum partner plaque with a plexi stand, a letter of welcome to the programme, and a really cool OPN Platinum Partner grommet-sign tied in a red bow. Impressed!

We owe this to our VP BizDev Pete Ling of course, so here’s a gratuitous hero shot of him holding his prize:

Pete Ling holding his OPN Platinum Plaque

By popular demand, here is my tour of our new World Headquarters.

We moved in today! We’re very proud of it and I’m sure if you check out the video you’ll agree it is pretty Shaktastic. :)

My old friend and collaborator Theo Schlossnagle at OmniTI posted his slides from his Scalable Internet Architectures talk at VelocityConf 2009.

The slides are brilliant even without seeing Theo talk and I highly recommend the time it takes to flip through them, for anyone who is interested in systems performance. If anyone took an mp3 of this talk I’m dying to hear it, please let me know.

For those of you unfamiliar with OmniTI, Theo is the CEO of this rather remarkable company specializing in Internet-scale architecture consulting. They generalize on Internet-scale architecture, not on one specific dimension the way Pythian specializes on the database tier. This allows them to see Internet-scale workloads from a unique systemic, multidisciplinary point of view; from the user experience all the way up the stack, through the load balancer (or not), the front-end cache, the application server, the database server, the operating system, the storage, and so on. This approach lets them build Internet architectures and solve scalability problems in a unique and powerful, wholistic way.

Pythian first collaborated with OmniTI in 2001, and they deserve all of their success and profile that they’ve built since then. Trivia: both Pythian and OmniTI were founded in September 1997 and both companies continue to be majority-owned and controlled by founders (in Pythian’s case, yours truly).

Here’s the slide deck. Let me know your thoughts.

Curt Monash of DBMS2, the database industry analysis and research blog, posted a flurry of Oracle/Sun/MySQL commentaries since the announcement, and upon learning that they no longer appear on PlanetMySQL I thought I would quickly draw the community’s attention to the thoughts of one of our industry’s most respected thinkers on the deal.

It is worth it to read them all. Here they are in reverse order of publication (meaning newest first):

• MySQL Miscellany

• I don’t see why the GPL would be a major barrier to a useful MySQL Fork

• This week is a really good time to actively strengthen the MySQL forkers

• MySQL Storage Engine round-up with Oracle-related thoughts

• Should the Oracle-MySQL Combo face antitrust opposition?

• First thoughts on Oracle Acquiring Sun

I am very excited to be able to link to this press release announcing that The Pythian Group is the founding partner in MySQL’s brand-new “Remote DBA Provider” partnership program. This is great news for Pythian. It is also good news for Sun/MySQL. (Although admittedly nowhere near as attention-getting as Oracle’s announcement of their purchase of Sun Microsystems. Note that Pythian has been an Oracle partner for a very long time already.)

What this means is that MySQL Platinum Enterprise Support for MySQL is now bundled with every Pythian support contract. As a partner at the Platinum-level—the highest-tier support for MySQL—Pythian receives the level of support that most closely meshes with the elite and ultra-responsive level of enterprise infrastructure management that has been our tradition for over ten years.

This will now allow us to provide our customers cohesive and collaborative services of the highest calibre in full co-operation with the brilliant engineers at MySQL. (Something to note—there is currently no other way to get MySQL Platinum Enterprise Support on a monthly-pay basis other than through Pythian; otherwise it is an annual subscription.)

When the matter is related to database management, operations and administration, consulting, architecture, server consolidation, cloud offload, clustering, or sharding, Pythian engineers will take the lead in consultation with MySQL. When the matter is product functionality, emergency or routine product support, enhancement requests, patches, and so forth, MySQL will take the lead as coordinated by Pythian, so that the client always has Pythian fully-informed and in control of the optimal delivery of support.

This partnership represents months of work by Pythian’s Peter Ling in collaboration with Anna Weihl at Sun, with Andrew Waitman’s and my support together with that of Sun’s Kevin Schmidt, Jeff Wiss, and Karen Tegan Padir.

I also want to thank Marten Mickos for his early advocacy surrounding this strategy. Marten, although you have left Sun, you should be happy to know that the community spirit you led with from the top has caught on and not flagged since your departure.

A short post to direct people’s attention to and solicit comments on the following from someone who is admittedly a hero of mine, Richard Stallman:

But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.

“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he told The Guardian.

“Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.

His comments echo those made last week by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who criticized the rash of cloud computing announcements as “fashion-driven” and “complete gibberish”.

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do,” he said. “The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”

That blockquote links to the article at the Guardian where Stallman is interviewed and quoted. Please follow it to read the article in its entirety.

What do you think?

Here’s a cool video of Alex Gorbachev commenting on the Ellison announcements today to Oracle corporate communications, just moments after the end of the keynote:

On Darrin Leboeuf’s advice, I loaded Kevin Closson’s blog, and sure enough, he had something ready to publish.

It must have been KILLING Kevin to keep this a secret. It must be a huge load off to publish this thing.

Anyway, Christo has been assigned to study this in detail and digest it overnight. Expect some good analysis tomorrow.

So, here is Kevin’s post publishing some technical details.

Cheers,
Paul

P.S. I am sure this is the future direction of storage intelligence. The fact that Oracle is setting the bar to only formatting half the disks in order to satisfy the IO saturation of the bandwidth will set a new bar. Do you know how hard we work to convince customers to do this (and fail!?) That, and the connection to BAHD and the problems I laid out in that article are obvious, this approach sets a new bar and addresses all of those issues.

Christo, by the way, is willing to bet this is a full-blown Oracle instance running on each Exabyte Storage Server. Interesting idea. From a manageability point of view, this is mind-boggling but possible.

Notice to readers:
This is an excerpt of my liveblogging of the Keynote where the Oracle Database Machine was announced.

It is a mix of my comments in real time, and my quotes from things Larry Ellison said that I felt were worthy of mention.

You may be interested in reading more about Oracle’s Exadata platform. I would suggest taking a gander at Oracle’s product page and also reading up on Christo Kutrovsky’s Analysis of the Exadata and Oracle Database Machine announcement from a different point of view.

Also, Alex Gorbachev posted his analysis of the Oracle Database Machine and that’s a worthy read with some new technical details.

You may also be interested in the complete liveblog transcript of the keynote which includes my liveblogging of the rather boring HP advertiseynote before the big show.

I also separated out the Oracle Exadata Storage Server liveblog if you just want to get to the rest of the juicy stuff.

On with the liveblogging!

Second product announcement: The Oracle Database Machine (in partnership with HP).

Specs slides.

8 64-bit servers, 14 exadata storage servers, tons of ram.

Larry: “It will hold really a lot of songs”.

Three year development program.
Custormers:
Amazon, Yahoo, Countrywide, NPD, Quelle

M-Tel: a Bulgarian company, 10-72 times speedup. The worst speedup was 10x.

Alex G: “It’s mainframes!”

Larry: “Next slide”. Martin W: “why doesn’t he have the clicker himself!?”

Christo (a bulgarian) “I can’t believe M-Tel had this and managed to keep it a secret. That’s funny.”

28x P-Series competitive advantage at M-Tel. For half of one.

Darrin L: “Yeah but what’s the price difference. How do you license this!?”

Good questions IMHO. Oracle licenses based on server performance. There is a major problem to be solved there.

TPC-H query set. 30x average speed-up.

They have a paper describing it. Will be intersting to read it.

Christo: “This seems to be parallel-query only! It might be only for data warehouses!”

Larry: “With a conventional array, when you add storage, you don’t add data bandwidth. With this solution, every time you add storage server, you are adding not just disk capacity, but two infiniband pipes, two processors, and more cache”.

Makes Sense. Refer to BAHD again. Man I feel a bit smart right now.

Now bashing Teradata. I guess we’re into the advertising section.

Now Larry is saying how similar this is to Netezza. One processor per disk drive. Christo is saying it’s very similar.

Larry: two big differences:
1. our database machine runs oracle, theirs does not.
2. we lose a drive, ours keeps running, theirs does, their queries stop.
Christo “umm no they don’t they have three way mirroring”.

Great quip: “even I studied about B-Tree indexes in School!” LOL LOL

Slide – comparing vs. Netezza. Clearly this is the company they are targeting.
Oracle’s stuff is bigger and faster and has more cores and faster bandwidth.

Christo: “The question is, does that CPU sort.”

HP Oracle … 650,000 vs. 1.500,000 for Teradata system with less spec.

In the Oracle column, you need to pay the 1.7 mm software license.

Software license for Oracle though… 1.7mm. There is something interesting going on here.

“Even if you pay list for Teradata, it’s cheaper for capacity.”

Next slide……..

Will speed up OLTP as well as data warehousing.

Available today, 10-50x faster than current (in small type) oracle data warehouses”

I must have missed something. How is this not costing more than Teradata?

OK Christo explained, the Oracle system had triple the storage for modestly more cost.

Mark Hurd talking again. Can HP please hire somebody exciting? Maybe exciting is just not what they do.

Adds the fact that these storage servers are “completely open, proliant-based servers”.

I wonder how long this will be HP-only.

Next, I think you’ve listened to me for long enough, now take a moment and listen to this advertising interlude.

More to come.

Notice to readers:
This is an excerpt of my liveblogging of the Keynote where the Exadata Storage Server was announced.

It is a mix of my comments in real time, and my quotes from things Larry Ellison said that I felt were worthy of mention.

You may be interested in reading more about Oracle’s Exadata platform. I would suggest taking a gander at Oracle’s product page and also reading up on Christo Kutrovsky’s Analysis of the Exadata and Oracle Database Machine announcement from a different point of view.

You may also be interested in the complete liveblog transcript of the keynote which includes my liveblogging of the rather boring HP advertiseynote before the big show.

I also separated out the Oracle Database Machine liveblog if you just want to get to the rest of the juicy stuff.

So here goes with the liveblogging transcript:

Announcing Oracle’s first ever hardware product.

The exadata programmable storage server.

Building intelligence into the storage server.

Allows us to reduce the amount of data.

Confirming HP is the partner.

Storage server does not pass disk blocks back to the database server, it actually passes query results.

Note: A few startups are doing this sort of thing already. They should be totally freaking out right now.

Slide explaining how query processing works in traditional storage.

Stark contrast to a grid of exadata storage servers, with processing ability local to each and every disk drive.

“We actually pass the query from the database server directly into the storage servers.”

Explaining how this works.

This reminds me hugely of kickfire for mysql, but for Oracle.

Cool, they’re provisioning two infiniband pipes per storage server. Nice. 40gbps.

Marc Fielding: “The problem is still the disk drives.”

Larry: 1gb/s per exadata storage server, you can have dozens working in parallel.

Christo: 1gb/s??? that’s not that good.

Immediately available for Linux., will work with any Oracle database.
Available for x86. Christo: “not 64 bit???????”

By the way, I made a bet with Paul Cunningham that Kickfire would fail because of Moore’s law. I wonder if I should bet against this tech too.

More details to come…