Oracle (News - Alert) and Intel have announced two key initiatives aimed at taking out IBM and SAP, Oracle’s traditional arch-nemeses.
To begin with, a partnership called "Exa your power” firmly sticks a stick in the eye of IBM (News - Alert) by offering Big Blue customers a free proof-of-concept study on migrating to Oracle's Exadata cloud servers powered by Intel processors. The campaign is aimed at those running IBM Power Systems, promising lower costs and higher performance—and is indicative of a change in the competitive landscape, as far as Oracle is concerned.
“We compete with Amazon in cloud infrastructure and never, ever see IBM -- this is how much our world has changed,” said Oracle chairman Larry Ellison (News - Alert), during October 25 OpenWorld keynote.
Intel and Oracle are also looking to woo SAP's in-memory customers with Intel’s 3D Xpoint hardware, due out next year. Intel (News - Alert) CEO Brian Krzanich told OpenWorld attendees they will be “shocked” by the breakthroughs achieved with the new storage technology: He said that 3D Xpoint will be 1,000 times faster than NAND and 1,000 times more durable, and with 10 times the density of DRAM.
It will blend the lines between data center components, he added, as it can be used as both a bit-addressable device like DRAM and a block device like flash. As such, 3D XPoint represents one of the “most important storage advances of the past two decades,” Krzanich said. "The new chips will transform how we think about data and memory and storage.”
That’s especially true when it comes to the DIMMs form-factor of the technology. "You can imagine a two-socket server running six Terabytes in memory, virtually eliminating paging before memory and storage, taking performance to a new level," Krzanich said.
During the keynote, where the plans were teased, Ellison added, "Our two biggest competitors in last two decades have been IBM and SAP, and we no longer pay any attention to either one.” He added, “It's quite a shock. SAP nowhere in cloud, and only Oracle and Microsoft (News - Alert) is in every level of the cloud - applications, platform and infrastructure."
Edited by Rory J. Thompson