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* Posts by Mel Bournian

6 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Feb 2010

The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME

Mel Bournian
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Happy

Re: Upholstery

The XMP had upholstered seats - actually they covered up the boxes that housed the power supplies etc. The YMP still had the same approach but didn't have nice comfy upholstery on the "seats" just painted metal.

Little know fact (urban myth perhaps) about the immersion cooling systems is the flurocarbon could in theory decompose at high temerature to form PFIBs, which were supposedly toxic by inhallation in ppb concentrations. So in principle a short circuit in all those old circuit boards could cause this to happen. This was one reason Cray moved to the use of "cold plates" between the circuit boards on the YMP.

Still a really sexy design though.

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Nearly 90% of SAP customers find its cloud pricing confusing

Mel Bournian

Can't you make this fog more transparent, plead users

Surely, if you make fog transparent it isn't really fog anymore.

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Judge: Oracle must remain on Itanic

Mel Bournian

Partnerships?

I find it ironic that Oracle of all organizations should criticise another vendor over 'partnerships' given that Oracle's track record in that space is particularly inglorious.

Partnership with Compaq to use Tru64 clustering as the basis for Oracle 9iRAC cache fusion, then partner with Dell to promote on Linux.

Buy Sun and dump the Dell relationship

Partner with Red Hat and then release Oracle Enterprise Linux

Partner with Peoplesoft and then release Oracle HR

I'm not sure Oracle understand the meaning of partnership unless they believe it to be a stop gap until they have a product offering of their own to compete with, and when that fails, buy the competitor (Siebel, Peoplesoft, BEA ...)

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webOS daddy Jon Rubinstein exits HP

Mel Bournian
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Well there was Floating Point Systems: - acquired by Cray Research Incorporated to form their SPARC based Cray Superservers division. When CRI was acqured by SGI, Superservers was sold off to Sun Microsystems just as project "Starfire" matured. From memory, the Sun E10000 sold quite well during the dot com boom.

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Ellison drops iceberg in front of HP's unsinkable Itanic

Mel Bournian

So much for Oracle "Partnership"

Ironic that back in 2006 when Mark Hurd was still running HP, Larry Ellison stated "There is no more important platform for Oracle than HP and Itanium."

Should have seen this coming given the way Oracle behaves. Didn't they partner with PeopleSoft for HR before launching their own product, which failed, so they bought their former partner? Oh and then do the same with Siebel and BEA?

And didn't the Cache fusion techology that underpins Oracle RAC come from Compaq TruCluster, only for Oracle to push Dell in that space? Lets not forget the Oracle / HP Exadata offering too.

OK so HP made a huge mistake in partering with Microsoft for enterprise systems. HP spent years pushing Windows on Itanium but forgot the Compaq lessons of Alpha NT.

So what are Intel's plans are for Itanium? Either they are going to wind the platform down (perhaps no surprise there given more and more RAS features from IA64 make their way into x86 with every release). This would be catastrophic news for HP-UX and OpenVMS customers.

Or Intel remain committed to the processor? If it is the latter, then maybe HP should buy SAP and perhaps Ingres or Sybase. Then bundle RDMBS free of charge with every HP-UX and OpenVMS license sold ...

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Intel set for server chip blitz

Mel Bournian

Random oberservations

#1 SGI isn't famed for it's decision making - remember they bought Cray Research and immediately sold off Cray Superservers to Sun Micro just as project Starfire was about to be launched ... thus handing the E10K directly to a competitor.

#2 HP still sell PA-RISC and Alpha too ... through the Renew programme - OK so they aren't building new systems but that's not the point.

#3 Most customers keep running UX, Solars or AIX for one of two reasons - they need the scalability or they need the stability of the current platform and the costs of migration of a critical application outweigh the savings.

Only time will tell if IA64, Power or Sparc have a long term future. I hope so because the IT world will be a boring place if all we have is x86.

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