By Cat Yong
Last year, during my first Oracle Open World campaign, I came across Oracle’s Engineered Systems, and the warning bells immediately began to ring in my head. A specially integrated solution prepared for you, by one single vendor?
Vendor lock-in isn’t the type of question that one can ask outright of the range Oracle execs that were laid out at the media’s disposal during their annual global conference. (Note: I did ask. Selectively).
Most times, just silent observation over a long enough period of time, can yield a truer picture, or at best, fill in the gaps in understanding, and give an idea as well, of some realities in the industry.
Let’s start from the beginning: What is the Oracle Engineered System? And is it the only one of its kind?
Taxonomy
Oracle describes Engineered Systems as software and hardware solutions, pre-integrated together. K. Raman, regional managing director of Oracle in ASEAN and SAGE (South Asia Growth Economies) explained, “It is a whole vertical stack from application, to middleware, to database with an operating system.”
Taking several steps back to view the whole industry however, integrated solutions, is a relatively new occurrence. I use the term, “relatively” very loosely. Last year, research companies like Gartner, IDC and more, had observed these kinds of solutions were popping out of the woodwork. But there is indication as early as 2010, that these ‘stacks’ were already in known existence.
That said, there were no official taxonomies around, because there were just so many different types of ‘integrated’ stacks.
Eventually in April, 2013, IDC launched a tracker for integrated infrastructure and platform, which according to IDC, MUST comprise of server hardware, disk storage systems, networking equipment and basic systems management software.
During an analyst meeting at OOW this year in September, IDC research director, Matthew Oostveen, had broadly categorised the 3 different technology approaches that fall under the integrated solutions umbrella.
The first grouping could be thought of almost as a turnkey private cloud. “This is where there is integration of all the different hardware facets, but also high-levels of automation software,” he said.
Then there is bare metal integration of different fabrics for networking, compute and storage. The third classification is all that with tie-in to the application layer. “This may go up to the database layer, it may go up to the application layer itself,” explained Oostveen.
Oracle’s Engineered Systems fall under the second and third definition.
IDC was also careful to point out that horizontal stacks or integrated infrastructure systems like VMware, Cisco and Netapp’s FlexPod, address general workloads, whereas vertical stacks or integrated platforms are more suited towards special workloads like analytics.
Larry’s special computers and the extreme data centre
During Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison’s first day keynote, I thought he had made a special effort to talk about the data centre of the future.
He had carefully emphasised Engineered Systems again, “When you think about all the things we have announced in terms of special-purpose computers, in the last few years, beginning with Exadata – a machine hardware and software designed to make database processing very fast – extreme performance was the initial goal.”
He went on to talk again about speed gains, cost savings and reliability, security and convenience because all the layers in the vertical stack have been pre-tested.
Ellison also added as a comparison, the standard layout of a typical data centre these days, “When you look at where data centres are going, what people are buying… they are typically buying and at the core of their data centre is Intel industry standard servers or commodity servers, whatever you want to call them, running virtualised Linux and interconnected by Ethernet. It’s cheap and good for anything.
“The stuff is cheap, but it is not necessarily good for everything.”
After some pretty fighting words, however, Ellison had ended with a “co-existing in peace” proposition by saying, “So, what the data centre of the future looks like is really a core of all these commodity servers and a collection of these purpose-built machines that give you better database performance, lower cost, more reliable back-ups and faster analytics.”
Vertical vs. Horizontal and a pretty revealing report
Data centres currently are modeled horizontally and are populated by the cheap, commodity servers, that Ellison spoke of. Conversations with his collection of APAC execs revealed what Oracle wants data centres to get to, is an efficiency model.
At some point in time, cheap isn’t cheap anymore, and the efficiency from an optimised solution would outweigh the cheap commodity customers normally end up buying in the past, they had said.
But pricing and efficiency aren’t the only considerations for customers to weigh.
The VMWare-Cisco-NetApp alliance ships integrated horizontal solution FlexPod, that IDC identified as relevant for enterprises and service providers who need a shared IT platform, instead of a single, workload-centric system, which is what Oracle’s Engineered System offering is.
So, for the moment at least, the purpose and objective of a system is another huge deciding factor.
Days after OOW ended, IDC finally released their tracker report about market share for integrated solutions in the infrastructure and platform space.
It’s good to note that sales of integrated platform Systems generated USD539.4 million in sales during the quarter, which represented 21.1% year-over-year growth and 41.0% of the total market value. Oracle was the biggest supplier with 56.7% or USD305.9 million.
Sales for integrated infrastructure however, was much bigger, up 80.3% year over year during the second quarter with USD775.7 million worth of sales. Integrated infrastructure or horizontal type integrated solutions makes up a majority 59% of the total market value.
IDC’s report further elaborated on the integrated infrastructure space, “The Cisco and NetApp partnership that brings the FlexPod systems to market (referred to as Cisco/NetApp in the above table) generated USD203.1 million worth of Integrated Infrastructure sales during the quarter, representing a 26.2% share and the top ranking within this market segment.” (NetApp had something to say about this too, here).
The VMWare, Cisco and EMC partnership (VCE) however, manages USD176.1 million sales within the same time period, coming in behind FlexPod sales.
This is a curious happening as EMC could be viewed as a more established storage player, not to mention they also own VMWare which brings the virtualisation technology piece to their solution and NetApp’s FlexPod’s solution.
To be continued at part 2
*Enterprise IT News was a guest of Oracle’s to Oracle’s Open World 2013 at San Francisco from Sept 22nd till Sept 26th.*
