Sun, Oracle Together Again?

What's the dealio with Sun and Oracle?

After years of an apparent riftwith Larry Ellison tooting the horn for cheap, standard blades from Dell, HP, well, mostly Dell, it appears that he and Sun's Scot McNealy have kissed and made up. (Now THERE'S an image to forget.)

Witness Sun's November press release which quotes Ellison saying: "It's impossible to ignore the significant market opportunity created by the incredible growth of Solaris 10 along with Sun's industry-standard x64 and UltraSPARC-based systems. Solaris was the clear choice for our development platform."

Solaris? THE clear choice for our development platform?

This week, Oracle said it would count each Sun UltraSPARC T1 core as a quarter of a processor. That's opposed to half a processor for each AMD/Intel core. Hmmmm.

What happened to all that Wintel love Oracle's handed out the last couple of OracleWorlds?? As we all know, both AMD and Intel are in the 64-bit world too.

McNealy was clearly irked by Oracle's cozy ties with Dell and HP, especially in light of the historic relationship between Oracle and Sun. Oracle's pro-Linux push, which came before Sun reluctantly embraced that operating system, forced Oracle's hand, some say.

At Gartner ITXpo 2004, McNealy was asked about Oracle's Linux push . His response was something along the lines of: "The Oracle implementations that work run on Solaris."

So there.

Even Oracleans have been mighty perplexed by the latest Sun-sided verbiage.

Analyst Charlie Garry thinks Oracle is acting in its usual self interest. That Ellison statement for Sun, says he, is as big as Oracle getting behind Linux. Oracle has "recognized that a huge portion of their installed base is still on Solaris," he notes.

They want the cheapest possible platform on which to run their rather pricey database, is the bottom line. If that platform is Solaris or Linux, it makes them no never mind.

Some Oracle partners say the vendor is not too happy with Dell's service and support of its wares and partners themselves (as usual) are irked at the margin pressure Dell applies.

Stay tuned.