When Larry Ellison of Oracle and
Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems waltzed out to the podium December 14 of last year and announced a sharing of key technology, it garnered a lot of attention — if not everyone’s credulity. The premise of the deal largely driven by Oracle is relatively simple: In the future most applications, including mission-critical ones, will run on the Internet (or IP in some form). The Internet runs on servers. Servers run faster and more reliably without a lot of overhead, so get rid of the unnecessary elements of an operating system and marry what’s left with a Web-tuned database manager for maximum performance. Such a server is what Larry Ellison called “Raw Iron” in a keynote speech at the fall ’98 Comdex.
To develop this server, Oracle and Sun will team their technologies—Oracle providing the Oracle 8i database engine and Sun providing kernel portions of its Solaris operating system—in an effort to produce the world’s fastest database server. Who needs Windows NT/2000? Ellison argues that Oracle 8i already manages its own files, provides security, and runs a Java Virtual Machine. All that’s needed for OS replacement is some speedy and reliable core routines to talk to the CPU for memory and disk management. That’s what the Solaris kernel will provide. When the pieces are in place, however, this isn’t an OS-less system, it’s more like “OS Lite.” (Ellison and McNealy might prefer “OS Lean and Mean.”)
Oracle has already begun negotiating arrangements with Compaq and Dell for the appropriate hardware. The real hardware impetus is the approaching arrival of 64-bit chips from Intel. Ellison would like the Raw Iron servers to be the first to take advantage of the next-generation CPUs. The claims, appearing long before release of any product, are for increases of speed on the order of 100 percent. Even discounting that figure by half leaves a respectable improvement. However, the bottleneck in many Web applications hasn’t been at the database but rather the Web and application servers. Not much has been said about the other side of the Oracle/Sun deal, which is for Sun to use the hybrid technology for its own middleware. Sun currently has two application servers, NetDynamics and now Netscape Application Server, and Oracle has one of its own.
This partnership has plenty of doubters. But it doesn’t much matter that Ellison’s visionary track record isn’t good. (Remember the NC or the buyout of Apple Computer?) What matters, to use an old baseball metaphor, is not that you hit a home run every time at the plate, but whether you get to bat at all. Ellison keeps coming to bat, despite a lousy average. So, to leave the metaphor behind, the key may very well be marketing. If the Raw Iron server performs well and is priced low enough to be a real Internet appliance, it could be a hot seller. However, if it needs the 64-bit chip to stand out from the competition, then it will probably be a high-end product, a variant option like Linux. It would be interesting, but hardly a “Microsoft killer” for the mainstream.
Nelson King has written about the computer industry for 15 years while attempting to keep up with every twist in the road as a software developer. He is currently developing a laboratory information management system for the state of Michigan. You can contact Nelson at nhking@winternet.com
Ellison and McNealy see the OS-less server as superceding bloated general-purpose operating systems — namely, Windows NT/2000. What this says about Unix and Linux is interesting to consider. For Microsoft, this challenge is (among other things) another arrow in its legal quiver. Microsoft contends that technical monopolies — if they exist at all — are ephemeral. Expect this argument to be bolstered by the Oracle/Sun partnership along with the AOL/Netscape/Sun deal.
When you get down to it, a Raw Iron server is going to be just another platform. However, this platform has two parents. Will they continue development and cooperation with their most sensitive technologies? Will they provide the right kind of support and documentation? Will third-party developers want to create software for this platform?
That these two companies and their leaders are headstrong to the point of mercurial is well known, but working partnerships aren’t necessarily joined at the head. Still, you can expect Microsoft to exploit the potentially unsteady relationship.
