Liveblogging Larry Ellison’s Keynote

I’ll be liveblogging the keynote here along with Marc Fielding, Christo Kutrovsky, Darrin Leboeuf and Luke Davies and Martin Wisniewski.

First observation: I can not believe I can not make this video full screen.

Even Pythian’s flash video player can go full screen.

Introduction time. Safra Katz.

Confirming HP is here as part of the announcement.

So presentation from HP is here first. Weird. Maybe this is a megabucks commercial keynote. Introducting Exec VP Anne Livermore.

“Very very very very very important event for HP. 100000 joint customers.”

Show of hands for HP adoption. A bit lame, she seems disappointed with how many hands are raised. :-)

The video stream is super saturated, the video is super skippy. Hopefully I can understand what’s going on well enough to do this liveblog.

So far it’s completely a vendor advertisement keynote.

“By 2010, more than 1/3 of CEOs and CIOs realize their datacenters will not meet their demand”.

This is not that big a deal according to Marc Fielding. Basically, Duh, 2/3 of datacenter CEOs do not need to invest further to make it through two years, 1/3 does. I agree.

Ugh another advertising slide. I hope there’s something meaty here.

One in six HP servers runs Linux. That’s interesting.

Bragging about HP winning vs. EMC.

HP would be the sixth largest software company in the world if you looked at only software revenue (interesting)

“Transforming the data center”

“True 24×7 lights out automated and energy efficient data center”

I am IMing with Alex Gorbachev who is at the keynote floor.

I asked him:

Paul Vallee
5:44
do you think HP is only going to advertise here?
5:41 PM

or are they part of this x

oracloid11g
5:44
I think they are

I think it’s crazy for Larry to allow HP to announce it then. He will come onstage with them?

Oh my god she’s actually playing an advertisement.

“next generation data center”

Christo: “I think we were too optimistic, thinking it was going to some amazingly cool piece of Oracle software. I’m starting to think we will be disappointed and it will be hardware.”

Alex Gorbachev is twittering live: https://twitter.com/alexgorbachev.

Darrin Leboeuf: “Maybe Oracle bought HP’s services arm!!! LOL”

HP spends 2% of revenue on IT. Interesting. Consolidated 60+ datacenters into 6.
BTW among Pythian’s customers that share such data, I am aware of one large company spending 1.4%.
Not as large as HP though. :-) Maybe there is a cost to scale.

Talking about virtualization now. Still completely unrelated to X as far as I can see.

So far this looks like one of those million dollar advertising keynotes.

29 minutes of this and I’m still awake. I’m pretty proud.

LOL silence…. then “can i have the next chart please”

Christo Kutrovsky: “Can we have the big news now?”
Darrin Leboeuf: “Can we have the next slide please??? please? Next?”

Now she’s talking about EDS. I missed the point as to why?

I guess they’re partnering with EDS on services. All-righty then. This is also not keynote-worthy material.

OK I get it thanks to Martin. HP bought EDS. How did I miss this news? :-)

17:56 Shilling for EDS’ outsourcing. Here’s a tip, choose Pythian instead.

“Performance Optimized Datacenters, our PODs”. Clever.

So HP is following Sun’s lead in container-based datacenters. Way to go.

17:57 Alex Gorbachev: “So boring.”

(Christo suggested I timestamp. All times EST.)

HP working on eliminating copper in computers, replacing with laser+optical, as a power-saving play. Interesting.

18:00 “to wrap up…” woo hoo

Everyone here in my office left except Christo and I. That should paint a picture.

Polite applause.

OK, Larry’s sailboat is on the screen.

“Extreme Performance” . It’s showtime.

Lots of sailboat visuals. Larry loves his sailboat. He seriously loves it. We get it.

18:03 “Ladies and gentlemen, Larry Ellison”

Wow now he’s talking about sailing. Incredible.

OK I’m giving up the sarcasm. The commercial is over and I’m getting ready to get excited.

“next slide please” wow this has not been rehearsed much. Probably because of the secrecy.

Looks like this will be about VLDB. Databases are tripling in size every two years.

“Disk systems today simply can not cope with the amount of data that has to be moved off those drives. We have a huge bandwidth problem”.

“You don’t have to have a 200tb db to start experiencing the slowdowns. 1tb is the elbow of the curve [pretty graph]”

Darrin and Marc are back. I guess it’s getting interesting again.

Two possible solutions:
1. reduce data going through to the storage systems.
2. wider, faster pipes, and more of them.

(reminds me of the bahd).

Announcing Oracle’s first ever hardware product.

The exadata programmable storage server.

Building intelligence into the storage server.

Allows us to reduce the amount of data.

Confirming HP is the partner.

Storage server does not pass disk blocks back to the database server, it actually passes query results.

Note: A few startups are doing this sort of thing already. They should be totally freaking out right now.

Slide explaining how query processing works in traditional storage.

Stark contrast to a grid of exadata storage servers, with processing ability local to each and every disk drive.

“We actually pass the query from the database server directly into the storage servers.”

Explaining how this works.

This reminds me hugely of kickfire for mysql, but for Oracle.

Cool, they’re provisioning two infiniband pipes per storage server. Nice. 40gbps.

Marc Fielding: “The problem is still the disk drives.”

Larry: 1gb/s per exadata storage server, you can have dozens working in parallel.

Christo: 1gb/s??? that’s not that good.

Immediately available for Linux., will work with any Oracle database.
Available for x86. Christo: “not 64 bit???????”

By the way, I made a bit with Paul Cunningham that Kickfire would fail because of Moore’s law. I wonder if I should bet against this tech too.

Second product announcement: The Oracle Database Machine (in partnership with HP).

Specs slides.

8 64-bit servers, 14 exadata storage servers, tons of ram.

Larry: “It will hold really a lot of songs”.

Three year development program.
Custormers:
Amazon, Yahoo, Countrywide, NPD, Quelle

M-Tel: a Bulgarian company, 10-72 times speedup. The worst speedup was 10x.

Alex G: “It’s mainframes!”

Larry: “Next slide”. Martin W: “why doesn’t he have the clicker himself!?”

Christo (a bulgarian) “I can’t believe M-Tel had this and managed to keep it a secret. That’s funny.”

28x P-Series competitive advantage at M-Tel. For half of one.

Darrin L: “Yeah but what’s the price difference. How do you license this!?”

Good questions IMHO. Oracle licenses based on server performance. There is a major problem to be solved there.

TPC-H query set. 30x average speed-up.

They have a paper describing it. Will be intersting to read it.

Christo: “This seems to be parallel-query only! It might be only for data warehouses!”

Larry: “With a conventional array, when you add storage, you don’t add data bandwidth. With this solution, every time you add storage server, you are adding not just disk capacity, but two infiniband pipes, two processors, and more cache”.

Makes Sense. Refer to BAHD again. Man I feel a bit smart right now.

Now bashing Teradata. I guess we’re into the advertising section.

Now Larry is saying how similar this is to Netezza. One processor per disk drive. Christo is saying it’s very similar.

Larry: two big differences:
1. our database machine runs oracle, theirs does not.
2. we lose a drive, ours keeps running, theirs does, their queries stop.
Christo “umm no they don’t they have three way mirroring”.

Great quip: “even I studied about B-Tree indexes in School!” LOL LOL

Slide – comparing vs. Netezza. Clearly this is the company they are targeting.
Oracle’s stuff is bigger and faster and has more cores and faster bandwidth.

Christo: “The question is, does that CPU sort.”

HP Oracle … 650,000 vs. 1.500,000 for Teradata system with less spec.

In the Oracle column, you need to pay the 1.7 mm software license.

Software license for Oracle though… 1.7mm. There is something interesting going on here.

“Even if you pay list for Teradata, it’s cheaper for capacity.”

Next slide……..

Will speed up OLTP as well as data warehousing.

Available today, 10-50x faster than current (in small type) oracle data warehouses”

I must have missed something. How is this not costing more than Teradata?

OK Christo explained, the Oracle system had triple the storage for modestly more cost.

Mark Hurd talking again. Can HP please hire somebody exciting? Maybe exciting is just not what they do.

Adds the fact that these storage servers are “completely open, proliant-based servers”.

I wonder how long this will be HP-only.

Next, I think you’ve listened to me for long enough, now take a moment and listen to this advertising interlude.

My comments: This is definitely a premium play. It will be interesting to follow the developments. It is not at all what I thought it would be, but it is fascinating.

I bet against Kickfire with Paul McCullagh because of Moore’s Law limiting the long-term value of the speed-up. Maybe I was wrong, Larry is betting a lot more money that I am.

Christo: Let me sum it up: This is parallel query being pushed down to the disk.

Christo: I have two words for you: Object Checkpoint.
Basically before you run a parallel query on any object, you have to checkpoint it. This is already there in 10g and is an enabling technology.

Darrin: When you start up an instance, does it start up an instance on the disk server?
Christo: Doesn’t need it, just needs a filter server.

Christo: The question is, does it sort???????? This is extremely important.

Christo: My first guess was a SAN. But I never imagined Oracle would start having a hardware play. (Or two).

Christo: They got tired of people not buying bandwidth, so they’re forcing people to buy it now. Smart.