Parallelisation is the future of the company's product lines, says Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
In his keynote address at Oracle OpenWorld, in San Francisco, Ellison said his company would be pushing up performance and driving down costs by making everything as parallel as possible.
“To reduce cost and increase performance, we started with a fundamental architecture of 'parallel everything',” he said.
“There are limits in physics to how fast a single processor can go. Disk drives can go only so fast and we all buy essentially the same disk drives. We all use the same flash drives and it's available to all of us who build computer hardware. So we have to have lots of separate servers and we have to have lots of separate storage servers.”
Making magic
Oracle's status as a hardware company since its acquisition of Sun Microsystems is also an advantage, said Ellison.
“If we design the software and hardware in concert, you can do a better job than if one company designs the operating system, another does the VM, and another does the database. But Apple is doing a pretty good job designing hardware, software and online services to work together.
“If that works for consumers, who are very demanding because it's their own money they're spending, then we thought it could work for us to build better performance at a lower cost, if we engineered things to work together.”
Ellison said reports of the Sun hardware business' demise were greatly exaggerated. “When we bought Sun, a lot of people said we were going to get out of the hardware business. I guess we didn't get the memo.”
Ellison also touted the advantages of Oracle's new compression technology. “If you compress the data, magic things happen. You only have to buy one-tenth of the disk when everything is compressed. You also only have to move one-tenth of the data. And because we move data 10 times faster, then those 10s multiply into 100 times faster than everyone else in this business. But you can take that advantage in either performance or cost savings.”
Oracle OpenWorld runs this week in San Francisco's Moscone Centre. More than 45 000 delegates are attending, adding $100 million to the local economy.
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