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> Ellison showed off a new Oracle Dense Cloud IO bare metal cloud server offering that will provide developers with 36 CPU cores, 512GB of D-RAM, and 28.8TB of

by mataug 10y ago

> Ellison showed off a new Oracle Dense Cloud IO bare metal cloud server offering that will provide developers with 36 CPU cores, 512GB of D-RAM, and 28.8TB of SSD storage. AWS isn't merely about the compute. EC2 is just part of a larger ecosystem of infrastructure services that has been built out by amazon over the past 10 years. If Oracle thinks they can beat that, then more power to them but I'm not quite convinced. I'm happy that there's more competition but Oracle's offering seems more like empty words rather than concrete competition. Maybe they'll now stop pouring resources into the Google lawsuit and actually pursue building new useful products.

blowski 10y ago
Indeed, nothing in the press release suggests any kind of innovation. Initially, it sounds a lot cheaper than AWS - but the only pricing given is per core, nothing about RAM, network, storage, etc.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Beating AWS on price is trivial, though. If you can't beat AWS on price, you have no business starting a cloud service. So it's a question whether they think they need to beat AWS on price or not. AWS pricing certainly makes it very clear that Amazon have no interest or need to compete on price - a lot of the cloud market is extremely price insensitive. It's a curious effect that seems to be largely down to businesses not used to paying as close attention to the long term opex costs of cloud infrastructure vs capex spend on servers etc.. E.g. I have had clients who paid more just for bandwidth with AWS than their whole infrastructure cost after migrating them elsewhere (AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location)
  - merb 10y ago
    > AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location Manpower and a Stable network is anywhere from 100x to 1000x as expensive as just hosting on AWS.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      That's not my experience. My experience is that operating systems outside of AWS is not much different in terms of staff time than operating systems on AWS, and for most people network availability issues are far down the list of outage reasons. I've not ever seen any non-AWS setups where manpower or network stability contributed anywhere remotely enough to operations to eat up the cost advantage over hosting elsewhere. There are good reasons to use AWS, if you can leverage their various services, and hosting isn't a large part of your cost, but price is not it.
      - merb 10y ago
        Really you probably never hired people.
        vidarh 10y ago
        I have hired dozens of engineers over the last 20+ years I've done this, so maybe you shouldn't jump to conclusions to you have no basis for.
  - dexterdog 10y ago
    If beating AWS on price is trivial, why is nobody doing that to beat them? The only place I have a gripe on AWS pricing is bandwidth. I keep waiting for the announcement that bandwidth is being cut in half next month and it hasn't happened. I've done the datacenter thing many times and there are so many pieces to the costs of running your own that most people don't include. The biggest one is just plain agility. Predictable workloads can benefit from self-hosted, but then again you can get much better prices at AWS when your loads are predictable as well if you're willing to commit.
    - mcpherrinm 10y ago
      Google's "Custom Machine Types" can be a big pricing win over Amazon if your workload doesn't match Amazon's pre-built options.
    - vgt 10y ago
      Google Cloud has made several big efforts to make cloud pricing cheaper, simpler, and more flexible for its customers: - List Prices are cheaper [-1] - Google Sustained Use Discounts are like RIs but applied automatically and without commitments (up to 30% off if you use a VM for 100% of a month) [0] - Preemptible VMs are a fixed 70-80% off, rather than the uncertain and highly variable Spot Instance Market [1] - Custom Machine Types offer you the ability to set your own CPU/RAM [2] - Both Google and Microsoft offer per-minute pricing - VM sizing recommendations will give you a message when you can save money[3] In the end, Google Cloud can be 40% cheaper than AWS[4] [-1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing [0] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use [1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible [2] https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/ https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/ [3] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Cloud-Platform-features-that-can-save-you-time-and-money.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Clou... [4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-cuts-our-cloud-is-still-way-cheaper/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-c... (disc: work @ Google Cloud)
    - serge2k 10y ago
jdc0589 10y ago
Bare IaaS still has its place for now, and at that point the major factors are hardware, uptime/reliability, and cost. Lots of companies either can't utilize SaaS/PaaS offerings from most cloud providers (regulatory requirements those providers don't comply with), or just have legacy products that aren't near EOL yet.
richmarr 10y ago
> EC2 is just part of a larger ecosystem... Exactly. The idea that Oracle can catch up based on pricing & machine specs ("36 CPU cores, 512GB of D-RAM") is really naive. My current position on this is that IaaS is pretty much over. Aliyun & AWS seem like they're going to dominate. Microsoft & Google & others fight for the rest. Maybe, just maybe, Oracle will catch up with the 'small' players, but I doubt Microsoft++ or Google will be sitting on their hands wondering how much DRAM Oracle is going to wow us all with next.
- serge2k 10y ago
  Is Aliyun that big?
  - gaius 10y ago
    Big in China, and China is big... Believe they are 4th largest overall at the moment but who can keep up with the ever changing league tables? I am planning to kick the tyres on them this weekend actually.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Who's Aliyun?
  - abverma 10y ago
    Alibaba Web Services
dfsegoat 10y ago
I tried their DBaaS offering about 18 months ago. The setup / "control panel" is laughable compared to even the most pedestrian of AWS service offerings. It worked, but it was not a user interface that inspired much confidence. Not sure if they had a CLI to even try instead.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> AWS isn't merely about the compute. Sure, but having a compelling story about compute and having a massive advantage in knowledge of how to sell to the exact kinds of enterprises that haven't already made their big transition to the cloud yet isn't a bad combination to have if you want to establish a nice firm place in cloud. from which you can expand and develop what you need to bite off other parts of the market. They aren't going to follow the same path as AWS, both because they aren't, as a corporation, oriented toward that path and because the low-hanging fruit you can pick up along that path has already been picked up by AWS.
- shemnon42 10y ago
  No, I think Oracle is targeting a different market because to them it is a low hanging fruit. AWS got a lot of startups and tech savvy companies (like Netflix). If I were Oracle I would target existing customers, who generally are not the tech savvy darlings (think Procter & Gamble, health companies, food companies, banks...) who can now tell their board their on-site Oracle licences have been moved to the cloud. It's a market Oracle is uniquely qualified to pursue because they already have the sales operation and contacts in place. Now whether they are able to execute is why we are eating the popcorn and watching. The inside sales model is the 20th century sales model after all.
  - not_real_name 10y ago
    ...and here is how that is going to play out. We're a large public sector customer. As part of our last ELA renewal (which was an effing effing nightmare over vmware licensing) we got this crapload of Oracle cloud products that we didn't really want or need, database cloud, process cloud, integration cloud, on and on. I think there must have been a mandate from Mark Hurd to the effect that "There will be cloud products on EVERY deal." So now our rep is trying to get us to do POC's to move apps onto the cloud stuff. I bet other customers can tell similar stories. And so Oracle can show growth in their cloud business...
    - luma 10y ago
      In regards to VMware licensing, allow me to expound upon a situation faced by a recent customer. Oracle allows licensing on VMware on a hypervisor level. When VMware allowed you to vMotion between hosts in a vSphere HA cluster, Oracle would require that you license all the hosts in the cluster because the Oracle VMs might land on any of those hosts in a failover situation. When cross-cluster vMotion came with 5.1, the customer was told that they must license every host attached to that vCenter instance, forcing the customer to purchase and implement another vCenter strictly for Oracle. And now, with vSphere 6, comes cross-vCenter vMotion. You can guess where that conversation with Oracle went. Customer bought an Oracle Enterprise license, which is presumably what the sales rep had in mind the whole time.
yid 10y ago
> If Oracle thinks they can beat that, then more power to them but I'm not quite convinced. Don't rule out the power of acquisitions (see: Firebase/Google, Parse/Facebook). Word on the street is that they're also throwing silly mounds of cash at cloud talent.
- serge2k 10y ago
  They just picked up a guy I know who has no cloud experience for a bundle of money. Seems like a bunch of people around seattle are getting the mounds of cash.
  - simonebrunozzi 10y ago
    What if I needed an intro to this guy of yours? (simone dot brunozzi @ gmail)
    - serge2k 10y ago
      Don't know him very well, we were only on the same team for a couple months and didn't really keep in touch or anything.
      - enosys 10y ago
        What range do you mean when you say "boat load of money"?
    - spunker540 10y ago
      Wanted: guy with no cloud experience
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - jodoglevy 10y ago
      I recently joined this team from Azure. Lots of senior AWS and Joyent folks here as well. Send me a mail at joe dot levy at oracle dot com and I can connect you with the right folks. Same goes for anyone else interested!

by mataug 10y ago

blowski 10y ago

Indeed, nothing in the press release suggests any kind of innovation. Initially, it sounds a lot cheaper than AWS - but the only pricing given is per core, nothing about RAM, network, storage, etc.

vidarh 10y ago
Beating AWS on price is trivial, though. If you can't beat AWS on price, you have no business starting a cloud service. So it's a question whether they think they need to beat AWS on price or not. AWS pricing certainly makes it very clear that Amazon have no interest or need to compete on price - a lot of the cloud market is extremely price insensitive. It's a curious effect that seems to be largely down to businesses not used to paying as close attention to the long term opex costs of cloud infrastructure vs capex spend on servers etc.. E.g. I have had clients who paid more just for bandwidth with AWS than their whole infrastructure cost after migrating them elsewhere (AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location)
- merb 10y ago
  > AWS bandwidth is easily anywhere from 5x to 50x as expensive as elsewhere depending on location Manpower and a Stable network is anywhere from 100x to 1000x as expensive as just hosting on AWS.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    That's not my experience. My experience is that operating systems outside of AWS is not much different in terms of staff time than operating systems on AWS, and for most people network availability issues are far down the list of outage reasons. I've not ever seen any non-AWS setups where manpower or network stability contributed anywhere remotely enough to operations to eat up the cost advantage over hosting elsewhere. There are good reasons to use AWS, if you can leverage their various services, and hosting isn't a large part of your cost, but price is not it.
    - merb 10y ago
      Really you probably never hired people.
      - vidarh 10y ago
        I have hired dozens of engineers over the last 20+ years I've done this, so maybe you shouldn't jump to conclusions to you have no basis for.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  If beating AWS on price is trivial, why is nobody doing that to beat them? The only place I have a gripe on AWS pricing is bandwidth. I keep waiting for the announcement that bandwidth is being cut in half next month and it hasn't happened. I've done the datacenter thing many times and there are so many pieces to the costs of running your own that most people don't include. The biggest one is just plain agility. Predictable workloads can benefit from self-hosted, but then again you can get much better prices at AWS when your loads are predictable as well if you're willing to commit.
  - mcpherrinm 10y ago
    Google's "Custom Machine Types" can be a big pricing win over Amazon if your workload doesn't match Amazon's pre-built options.
  - vgt 10y ago
    Google Cloud has made several big efforts to make cloud pricing cheaper, simpler, and more flexible for its customers: - List Prices are cheaper [-1] - Google Sustained Use Discounts are like RIs but applied automatically and without commitments (up to 30% off if you use a VM for 100% of a month) [0] - Preemptible VMs are a fixed 70-80% off, rather than the uncertain and highly variable Spot Instance Market [1] - Custom Machine Types offer you the ability to set your own CPU/RAM [2] - Both Google and Microsoft offer per-minute pricing - VM sizing recommendations will give you a message when you can save money[3] In the end, Google Cloud can be 40% cheaper than AWS[4] [-1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing [0] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use [1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible [2] https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/ https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/ [3] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Cloud-Platform-features-that-can-save-you-time-and-money.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/six-Google-Clou... [4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-cuts-our-cloud-is-still-way-cheaper/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-google-says-to-aws-price-c... (disc: work @ Google Cloud)
  - serge2k 10y ago

jdc0589 10y ago

Bare IaaS still has its place for now, and at that point the major factors are hardware, uptime/reliability, and cost. Lots of companies either can't utilize SaaS/PaaS offerings from most cloud providers (regulatory requirements those providers don't comply with), or just have legacy products that aren't near EOL yet.

richmarr 10y ago

> EC2 is just part of a larger ecosystem... Exactly. The idea that Oracle can catch up based on pricing & machine specs ("36 CPU cores, 512GB of D-RAM") is really naive. My current position on this is that IaaS is pretty much over. Aliyun & AWS seem like they're going to dominate. Microsoft & Google & others fight for the rest. Maybe, just maybe, Oracle will catch up with the 'small' players, but I doubt Microsoft++ or Google will be sitting on their hands wondering how much DRAM Oracle is going to wow us all with next.

serge2k 10y ago
Is Aliyun that big?
- gaius 10y ago
  Big in China, and China is big... Believe they are 4th largest overall at the moment but who can keep up with the ever changing league tables? I am planning to kick the tyres on them this weekend actually.
paulddraper 10y ago
Who's Aliyun?
- abverma 10y ago
  Alibaba Web Services

dfsegoat 10y ago

I tried their DBaaS offering about 18 months ago. The setup / "control panel" is laughable compared to even the most pedestrian of AWS service offerings. It worked, but it was not a user interface that inspired much confidence. Not sure if they had a CLI to even try instead.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> AWS isn't merely about the compute. Sure, but having a compelling story about compute and having a massive advantage in knowledge of how to sell to the exact kinds of enterprises that haven't already made their big transition to the cloud yet isn't a bad combination to have if you want to establish a nice firm place in cloud. from which you can expand and develop what you need to bite off other parts of the market. They aren't going to follow the same path as AWS, both because they aren't, as a corporation, oriented toward that path and because the low-hanging fruit you can pick up along that path has already been picked up by AWS.

shemnon42 10y ago
No, I think Oracle is targeting a different market because to them it is a low hanging fruit. AWS got a lot of startups and tech savvy companies (like Netflix). If I were Oracle I would target existing customers, who generally are not the tech savvy darlings (think Procter & Gamble, health companies, food companies, banks...) who can now tell their board their on-site Oracle licences have been moved to the cloud. It's a market Oracle is uniquely qualified to pursue because they already have the sales operation and contacts in place. Now whether they are able to execute is why we are eating the popcorn and watching. The inside sales model is the 20th century sales model after all.
- not_real_name 10y ago
  ...and here is how that is going to play out. We're a large public sector customer. As part of our last ELA renewal (which was an effing effing nightmare over vmware licensing) we got this crapload of Oracle cloud products that we didn't really want or need, database cloud, process cloud, integration cloud, on and on. I think there must have been a mandate from Mark Hurd to the effect that "There will be cloud products on EVERY deal." So now our rep is trying to get us to do POC's to move apps onto the cloud stuff. I bet other customers can tell similar stories. And so Oracle can show growth in their cloud business...
  - luma 10y ago
    In regards to VMware licensing, allow me to expound upon a situation faced by a recent customer. Oracle allows licensing on VMware on a hypervisor level. When VMware allowed you to vMotion between hosts in a vSphere HA cluster, Oracle would require that you license all the hosts in the cluster because the Oracle VMs might land on any of those hosts in a failover situation. When cross-cluster vMotion came with 5.1, the customer was told that they must license every host attached to that vCenter instance, forcing the customer to purchase and implement another vCenter strictly for Oracle. And now, with vSphere 6, comes cross-vCenter vMotion. You can guess where that conversation with Oracle went. Customer bought an Oracle Enterprise license, which is presumably what the sales rep had in mind the whole time.

yid 10y ago

> If Oracle thinks they can beat that, then more power to them but I'm not quite convinced. Don't rule out the power of acquisitions (see: Firebase/Google, Parse/Facebook). Word on the street is that they're also throwing silly mounds of cash at cloud talent.

serge2k 10y ago
They just picked up a guy I know who has no cloud experience for a bundle of money. Seems like a bunch of people around seattle are getting the mounds of cash.
- simonebrunozzi 10y ago
  What if I needed an intro to this guy of yours? (simone dot brunozzi @ gmail)
  - serge2k 10y ago
    Don't know him very well, we were only on the same team for a couple months and didn't really keep in touch or anything.
    - enosys 10y ago
      What range do you mean when you say "boat load of money"?
  - spunker540 10y ago
    Wanted: guy with no cloud experience
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - jodoglevy 10y ago
    I recently joined this team from Azure. Lots of senior AWS and Joyent folks here as well. Send me a mail at joe dot levy at oracle dot com and I can connect you with the right folks. Same goes for anyone else interested!