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Ninja Turtles are back!!

C Purcell| December 9, 2010
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During the recent Oracle product launch last week, Larry Ellison took a shot at HP, calling our machines “vulnerable” and “slow” and likening HP to “a turtle.”  You may also have heard that Oracle has shown disdain for customers by doubling the cost of Oracle licensing fees for customers running Oracle on HP Integrity (Itanium 9300). Read the full story…

 

It’s hard not to get emotional when these types of comments start to fly, so let’s keep with to the facts:

  • For Oracle to achieve their “world record” database performance, they had to create and benchmark a $30M (after 50% discount) RAC cluster of 27 SPARC nodes in completely unrealistic  “SuperCluster” environment.
  • The TPC-C benchmark they used is more than 18 years old (as old as Windows 3.1) and not representative of any real customer workload of today  
  • As of today, no one has been able to improve on the single system TPC-C on Oracle that HP Integrity delivered almost 4 years ago

Mr. Ellison may think his company is "one big cheetah”, but they’re currently having a hard time keeping pace with HP.  His cheetah analogy was interesting. Yes, cheetahs do run extremely fast, but after a full I minute sprint they are completely exhausted and don’t have the stamina it takes for a real world endurance race.

 

HP is the No. 1 provider of enterprise servers in the world. We are focused on our customers, and those customers continue to be won over by our combination of technology, product performance, and pricing. The numbers prove it – our Enterprise Storage and Servers segment saw 25% revenue growth year over year during Q4 FY2010, and HP was the only major UNIX vendor that reported server growth. In Q3 IDC also reported that the ratio of Itanium servers to SPARC was 125%.

 

Hopefully customers aren’t fooled by unrealistic benchmarks, no matter what Oracle claims. HP’s market share results prove it. Sun customers are switching to HP because they recognize we deliver superior technology, performance and value. Customers rightfully resist being forced into one vendor, one proprietary stack of database, software, storage and servers. Customers like choice, and HP represent that choice in the UNIX market.  

 

Is Oracle’s latest attempts at changing pricing structures and ‘trash talking’ HP an acknowledgement that we are the leader, taking significant revenue from their hardware business?  Our combination of superior products and Converged Infrastructure strategy are clear proof points why existing SUN customers are migrating from their existing platforms over to HP.

  • HP has #1 server revenue market share (3CQ10 IDC) with 33.4% , IBM has 30.6% (HP up 2.4 ppts YoY, IBM down 1.2 ppts YoY). 

To me, this last point is the best measure of competitive success, since this is a measure of where customers are voting with their wallets.

 

(And as for races, it may not be overly glamorous, but but as everybody knows, it was the turtle that wins the race, not the cheetah.)

 

Chris

 

Follow me on @HPIntegrity and @HP_UX

Tags: Converged Infrastructure| HP Integrity| Larry Ellison| Oracle| TPC-C benchmark View All (5)
Labels: Converged Infrastructure| HP Integrity| Larry Ellison| oracle| TPC-C benchmark
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Comments
ianm | ‎12-15-2010 01:47 PM
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Larry Ellison talks a lot but customers running real mission critical applications need a lot more convincing that some animal stories. People should look at other databases like Mimer (works very well on HP Integrity Servers - see UK NHSBT success story).
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About the Author
  • Kirk Bresniker is the Vice President/Chief Technologist for HP Business Critical Systems where he has technical responsibility for all things Mission Critical, including HP-UX, NonStop and scalable x86 platforms. He joined HP in 1989 after graduating from Santa Clara University and has been an HP Fellow since 2008.
  • I’m the worldwide marketing manager for HP NonStop. I’ll be blogging and tweeting out news as it relates to NonStop solutions – you can find me here and on twitter at @CarolynatHP
  • Cynthia is part of the HP ExpertOne team. ExpertOne offers professional IT training and certifications from infrastructure refresh to areas that span across the datacenter like Cloud and Converged Infrastructure.
  • I have worked with NonStop systems since 1982. I am a Master Technologist for HP and am part of the IT SWAT organization, the Cloud SWAT and work with HP Labs. I report into the Enterprise Solutions and Architecture organization.
  • Joe Androlowicz is a Technical Communications and Marketing manager in HP’s NonStop Product Division. Joe is a 25 year journeyman in information systems design, instructional technologies and multimedia development. He left Apple Computer for Tandem Computers to help launch G03 and hasn’t looked back yet. He previously managed the program management team for the NonStop Education and Training Center and drove the development and growth of the NonStop Certification programs.
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  • Vinay Gupta is an HP Distinguished Technologist and the NonStop Manageability Architect. He joined Tandem in 1994 after graduating from Indian Institute of Technology. He has worked on many NonStop manageability applications over time. He works across various groups within NonStop and HP to ensure consistency and interoperability in manageability interfaces and applications. He is also a member of DMTF workgroups.
  • Wendy Bartlett is a Distinguished Technologist in HP’s NonStop Enterprise Division, and focuses on dependability – security and availability - for the NonStop server line. She joined Tandem in 1978. Her other main area of interest is system architecture evolution. She has an M.S. degree in computer science from Stanford University.
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