Oracle Open World 2009 – Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has criticized IBM’s Power architecture. According to Ellison, Oracle and Sun recently routed Big Blue in an OLTP (online transaction processing) speed test.
“We took on 76 IBM [Power-based] racks with just 9 racks of SPARC-Solaris gear. We achieved 25 percent more throughput, along with a 16X better response time,” said Ellison. Their [racks] consumed 6X more energy, so now we know why IBM’s chip is called ‘Power.’ It is not very green. In the immortal words of Sarah Palin, ‘drill baby, drill.'”
Ellison also lambasted IBM for allegedly claiming that Oracle was leaving the hardware business and would not invest in Solaris or SPARC.
“We are not selling off our hardware business. SPARC is fantastic technology and it can be even better with investment by increasing the rate of innovation,” emphasized Ellison. “We will make it faster and more reliable, while reducing its power consumption. If IBM wants to compete, we are happy to compete. We intend to demonstrate that SPARC is the best [architecture] in the world.”
Ellison noted that Oracle now had the ability to simultaneously address hardware and software issues – which would grant the company a “huge opportunity” to design faster, cheaper and more reliable systems.
“There are definite advantages of single organization having control of both hardware and software. For example, Apple has done a tremendous job of tackling hardware and software problems at the same time,” added Ellison.
