"Oracle may be solving the wrong problem. Storage professionals are vocally frustrated with Oracle's front-line support and tough sales approach," says Coulter. "Everyone likes their databases to run fast, but performance is not raised as the issue with buying from Oracle. Pillar is better-liked, but dealing with Oracle sales and support will remain a damper."
Oracle needed a better SAN to fill out its portfolio--not just to integrate with Oracle software but to be able to compete more broadly as it fulfills on its dream of becoming a true systems company, says Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. He believes the "emerging vendor ceiling" on sales just got removed ... "with plenty of room within Oracle’s base. It has hundreds of thousands of users after all--Pillar had 600--before it even needs to look elsewhere, even though it will no doubt try."
Pillar’s issue was never really its product, says Peters. "Indeed, its Slammers and Bricks approach is a flexible architecture that’s capable and loved by its cadre of users. However, its marketing message--largely built around the QoS--never really caught on with the strength of some of the other new wave of SAN players ... 3PAR's thin provisioning and cloud, [Dell] EqualLogic’s simplicity, [Dell] Compellent's dynamic tiering."
In the June 23 earnings call, Hurd summed up Oracle's strategy and early success of selling integrated and optimized solutions to its customer base. "We have 300,000 database customers running Oracle database workloads. Every one of them is a prospect for Exadata. The exciting news is, in addition to this, the Exalogic ramp has been even better than Exadata, and every one of our 100,000-plus middleware customers is a prime prospect for Exalogic."
For its last quarter, the Sun hardware business brought in $1.2 billion, and while non-Sun storage was down significantly, Sun storage and tape grew very well, says Oracle. Ellison says more than 1,000 Exadatas are installed, and the company plans on tripling that number this year.
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