By Nick Patience
Hewlett-Packard Co has become the first hardware vendor to announce that it will ship a server running Oracle Corp’s Raw Iron combined database and slim operating system – despite Sun Microsystems Inc supplying the Solaris kernel that is at the heart of Raw Iron (12/15/98). HP’s machine will be a version of its NetServer Intel-based server and will be demonstrated running the Oracle 8i Appliance software – as Raw Iron is officially known – by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison at the NationsBanc Montgomery Securities Technology conference in San Francisco today, Monday. The companies will jointly market the machine. The reason HP has beaten Sun to the punch, says Nick Earle, HP’s VP and worldwide marketing director for its enterprise computing solutions organization, is because it offers Intel-based servers and it can bring those to market faster than a Sun Sparc RISC machine. The first one will ship some time in the first half of this year, starting at about $7,500 for a uniprocessor Pentium II machine. Oracle 8i itself is not due to ship until later this quarter. Oracle is not suffering from a lack of interest from other hardware manufacturers, including Dell, Compaq and Sun, said Gary Bloom, Oracle’s executive VP system products. The next two dedicated Oracle 8i appliances are likely to be an email machine featuring Oracle’s internet messaging software on top of 8i and then one featuring its still-to-arrive internet file system (IFS) on top of the database, which is a full version of 8i in each case. The IFS will not arrive until at least three months after the introduction of 8i. The Solaris kernel – we put it on a diet, said Bloom – has been stripped of the drivers and other unnecessary hardware support and anything that is not needed to run a database. It now comprises less than three million lines of code, he said. Sun licensed it to Oracle on a software exchange basis and Sun will not receive per-copy royalties. Earle says this will have no effect on its existing NT on Intel or HP-UX business because it is a new segment, he believes. He believes that HP will launch a version running on its PA-RISC machine eventually, as well as 4-way and 8-way Intel-based machines, should there be a demand for them . In terms of Oracle 8i running on NT versus regular Unix Bloom says Unix is a much more efficient operating system in an Intel environment than NT. He says it significantly outperforms NT on Intel.
