Pythian Group

So HP Cloud is finally yielding for some beta rain since their announcement late Sep.

It started late September when I signed up for private beta testing. They sent me this when I signed up

Thanks for your interest in HP Cloud Services. We will be sure to follow up with you when access becomes available. Since we’re only accepting a limited number of customers for our private beta based on customer profiles, we cannot guarantee that every request will be accepted.

However, we will review your submission and follow-up with you directly.

Two weeks ago, I got invited to join the beta and start testing the platform. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Liveblogging announcements from Sunday’s Oracle OpenWorld Keynote.

It’s 5:36 PM now – stay tuned…

@fuadar: Exadata smoothie and java juice in moscone south #oow10

5:44pm: Larry couldn’t get his boat under the Golden Bridge — next yer he needs a smaller boat or rebuild the bridge? :)

5:50pm: Oracle Partners Specialization awards… oh well, why is Pythian not on stage with our 4 Specializations? :(
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Counting down. The details are finally organized — this year, we have not one, but TWO great prizes at the Oracle OpenWorld Bloggers Meetup.

1) T-shirt art contest on stylish Pythian designer t-shirts — one lucky blogger will receive an HP X310 Data Vault, generously sponsored again this year by HP.

2) For the best, most creative blog post about the meetup itself, Pythian is giving away an Apple TV. But, there are a few small rules:

1. the blog post must use as many names of people in attendance as possible.
2. the blog post must be readable. It needs to make sense to someone who wasn’t there. It must be a story and not a list.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

It’s that time of the year again — Oracle OpenWorld time — and it’s my pleasure to announce our regular Oracle bloggers meetup again this year. We all know that Oracle community has grown this year so we expect to see folks from all the different technologies including MySQL, Java, Sun hardware folks in addition to the core Oracle database and apps crowd.

So… all of you Oracle bloggers attending Oracle Open World 2010…
… you are invited to attend this Oracle Bloggers Meetup during OOW 2010 — a chance to meet your online buddies face-to-face in relaxed and informal atmosphere.

When: Wed, 22-Sep-2010, 5:30pm

Where: Lower Dining Room, Jillian’s Billiards @ Metreon, 101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

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.

I’m sorry if everyone else knew this already, but I just noticed the following from the Live Keynote page (click on Larry’s keynote to see it):

So Larry will be joined on stage by bigwigs from HP.

You will remember that HP bought Polyserve, Kevin Closson’s clustered file systems company, a little while back.

No coincidence, I think, but as we know from multiple sources, Kevin is now at Oracle as an Architect on this new technology that Larry is announcing.

At first I thought the HP keynote was one of those big-pay vendor closers. But now, with it being one session in the Live View, and what we’re starting to learn about the likely nature (storage) of the innovation, the following snippet can easily be re-interpreted (interesting bit in my bold):

Transforming Business and Technology Today and Tomorrow
Innovation is the lifeblood of information technology, but businesses are far more selective today in the kinds of technology they will buy and deploy to ensure they remain competitive. They’re looking for practical innovation that will optimize business results such as lowering IT costs, reducing risk and improving growth and profitability. Come learn about HP’s customer-focused innovation, including investments in research, product development and advanced services that have increased energy efficiency, provided new approaches to datacenter transformation, and also given us new advances in internet technology that are shaping the future of enterprise IT. Also highlighted: the joint innovation that HP and Oracle are delivering to their customers around the world.

Ann Livermore | Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions Group, HP | Biography [+/-]
Mark Hurd | Chairman of the Board and CEO, HP

The pieces are coming together. Stay tuned as I will be writing further about this as the keynote begins.