If Oracle and its executive chairman Larry Ellison have a favorite competitive target, it's IBM. The latest broadside—delivered in conjunction with Intel—is aimed at luring customers running Oracle database workloads on IBM Power7-based systems to Oracle's Exadata platform, which uses Intel Xeon processors.
From the release issued Sunday at Oracle OpenWorld:
The Exa Your Power program is a free database migration Proof of Concept (PoC) for qualified customers. Oracle will assess the customer’s environment, deliver a customized database migration results report, and show how they may be able to significantly reduce the time and cost required to run critical database workloads.
“CSC has successfully migrated dozens of customers’ enterprise workloads to Oracle Engineered Systems as a part of our Digital Transformation Services. We recently migrated an Oracle Database for a major insurance provider from IBM Power 7 to an Exadata X5 engineered system as a Proof of Concept,” said Ashish Mahadwar, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Emerging Business Group. “Our test results showed their Siebel Application running four-to-ten times faster and their ETL Processes running up to 12-times faster on the Exadata. The customer was very impressed by the scale of the benefits and the ease of migration and is now working with CSC on a major Exadata deployment.”
Oracle and Intel are jointly backing the migration effort.
Thousands of customers are now running Oracle databases on "large and costly" IBM machines, CEO Mark Hurd said during a keynote at OpenWorld on Sunday. "We think you can do better."
While the program was just announced, it's been going on in some form for a while. Oracle and Intel have already partnered to move more than 1,000 customers from Power7 systems to Exadata, according to a slide Hurd displayed during his talk. One named example was homebuilder Pulte Group, which saw financial application performance improve by a factor of 15, according to Oracle.
"It's sort of on us, Intel and Oracle, to give customers an easy way to see just what the two of us can do together to make life a whole lot better," Hurd said. "We can take some of these workloads and go 10 times, 15 times faster than the legacy system."
The Bottom Line
There's quite a bit to unpack here. First of all, the tone of the sales pitch is much milder than ones Oracle has made in the past against IBM over Exadata. In 2012, Oracle yanked newspaper ads that the National Advertising Board concluded had overreached in their Exadata performance claims over Power Systems.
Hurd carefully refrained from making overly broad claims in his keynote remarks, underscored by the reference to improvements for "some" but not all workloads.
In addition, there's the matter of making fair, apples-to-apples comparisons. Oracle's press release provides the example of a customer moving from a Power7-based system to an Exadata X5, which is the newest model. But the Power7 architecture dates to 2010 and was succeeded by Power8 last year.
Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller has a measured perspective on the announcement.
"'Engineered systems' such as Exadata are an area of competition right now, and vendors are trying to trump older architectures or form strong combinations," Mueller says. "Here we see that IBM used to implement a lot of Siebel turnkey systems on Power, and Oracle-Intel now want to go for a larger footprint with these customers. But databases remain sticky and the servers they run on are closely connected to that stickiness. Look at the perennial attempts of SAP to move its customers off Oracle, to very little success."
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