Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Sun the new open source platform?

July 26, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Sun the new open source platform?

TAGS: Open Source

In case you missed the news, Greenplum and Sun have teamed up to deliver a monster of a business intelligence/data warehousing appliance. What's it called? Well, that's the downside: "The Data Warehouse Appliance." If you're still awake after reading the name, you'll still be blown away by the performance (and the price). Those, at least, are interesting: capable of scanning 1 terabyte of data in 60 seconds and can easily scale to hundreds of terabytes of usable database capacity (10-50X performance boost over the Terradata/etc. competition).

What will it run you? Well, you won't find it at CompUSA, but it's pretty cheap (relative to the competition) all the same. From the press release:

Initial configurations will deliver usable database capacities of 10, 40 and 100TB. Pricing for the 40TB and 100TB configurations begins at $15,000 per usable terabyte, and pricing for the 10TB configuration starts at $25,000 per usable terabyte. Ideal industries for this solution include telecommunications, financial services, retail and Internet services.

As I've written elsewhere, this isn't something that Oracle will be able to match any time soon. Its databases simply aren't set up to handle this kind of load. Greenplum is able to do it because it has the luxury of fine-tuning a PostgreSQL database to fit this need. In this way, we get to orders of magnitude price/performance benefits over the proprietary competition.

Since when is open source not about innovation and product strength?

All of which makes me wonder why Sun isn't doing more of this. That is, why isn't Sun striking up partnerships with MySQL, Alfresco, Red Hat (Yes, Red Hat), SugarCRM, JasperSoft, JBoss, etc.? Why not a campaign that says, "Open source runs fastest on Sun?"

Is there a big market for this today? Not really. Will there be tomorrow? Absolutely. The trajectories of open source's most successful companies are fantastic - revenues are doubling every year (if not more than doubling).

So why isn't Sun, which has done so much internally to support open source, doing more to highlight how well open source applications, application servers, databases, etc. run on Sun? Even Microsoft is doing this.

Jonathan?

Posted by Matt Asay on July 26, 2006 08:08 PM

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