Even though this week I’m on holiday, there are a couple of facts that should not be underestimated and still deserve a comment.
Fact 1: Oracle has decided, as many expected, not to pursue its partnership with HDS.
This decision is a clear sample of “Oracle-way-of-thinking” and just follows the strategy adopted so far: to keep complete control of the technology stack without having to depend on anyone as regards formulating offerings and maximizing profit.
If Oracle keeps on pushing things like exadata2 or the use of local SSD disks to store parts of a DB, then the storage to the HDS will result just increasingly sophisticated and more or less useless, at least according to our dear Larry!
HDS can definitely record this decision as bad news since Sun was the largest retailer in the world: now the Jap-Americans will be forced to make a quite difficult running start to restore its trading infrastructure, re-establish technical contacts and so on.
Sun customers find themselves with one more bitter pill to swallow: many bought from HDS to have a single supplier and are now in the unenviable situation of having two, they face an even more uncertain future with assistance and professional services contracts to be renegotiated with HDS rather than with Sun.
The message to Sun customers gets increasingly clear: what was not fully owned by Sun is about to be buried … every allusion to the storage 6000 is not casual!
Needless to say that Sun and HDS competitors are in high spirits: Sun facing hard present times, some storage systems are rather old (the agreement is dated 10 years ago), how much time will take HDS to restructure? More than enough to make any competitor’s mouth water.
Fact 2: IBM continues to push XIV and compares it to the DS8000
I know it’s strange but this must be a strategy, but a quite strange one.
Sure, if you try to ask questions about the performance of a XIV, responses will be among the most imaginative and evasive. Try and write XIV+performance on twitter, then everyone immediately will think about a joke.
I guess that IBM is really developing its “jewel” and maybe when we see the 1.0 2.0 version we will be stunned, who knows….
The more evil ones may think there’s a subtle struggle among IBM internal departments, but really, I think that behind there must be something more … All in all the DS8000 is widely considered as dead (hardware and software architecture are quite obsolete) and no replacement is planned .
Meanwhile, they just lay themself open to competitors in an almost paradoxical way