How serious? Serious enough to take on IBM directly in no uncertain terms. Here’s Quentin Hardy writing for the NYTimes Business Day Technology column, regarding Larry Ellison’s OpenWorld opening remarks:
“We want to take I.B.M. on in their strongest suit, microprocessors,” he said at Sunday’s opening of his OracleWorld trade show. The benchmark would be pure processing speed, he said, claiming that his new SPARC t4 chips are already faster than I.B.M. in running Java software. “We passed them in Java,” he said, “we’re going to pass them in every other area too.”
Ellison also tips his hat as to the shift from the hard drive medium to flash memory. As noted here on this blog before, flash storage is becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise and has the ability to be a game-changer if used intelligently. Here’s Hardy again:
Much of the speed in these new computers, Mr. Ellison indicated, comes from things like knowing how to compress data, so only critical elements need to be stored on a computer’s memory. It is then stored on the increasingly cheap and popular flash memory, instead of standard memory disks. But it is really about fast networking among a lot of very, very fast chips, managed by software that knows how to keep them working together.
Read Hardy’s whole piece here. Interesting stuff.
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