“It’s only going to be the high-end partners who can do that. Lower-end partners will still be pushing product out the door. You can’t add a hell of a lot of value to a two-socket x86 server.”
First steps
Resellers can cut their teeth by turning first to optimised architectures. Vendors such as Oracle, HP and IBM dole recipes for solutions optimised for applications built from their respective hardware portfolios.
The goal is to reduce the design investment and to cut errors integrating components but the systems integrator still needs to put it all together. Silver’s Remora is going the Oracle route, following on from the reseller’s heritage in Sun Microsystems that the database software maker bought last year.
The Exalogic is in its sales pipeline but Silver expects that appliances will follow for Oracle software such as JDEdwards, PeopleSoft, Fusion Apps, Siebel and E-Business.
He says that although IBM and HP promote architectures for Oracle software, Oracle has a home- ground advantage because it owns the intellectual property. Chief technology officer for Oracle’s line-of- business, Angus MacDonald, says the VCE alliance, HP and Microsoft have to compromise their designs to prevent sharing too many corporate secrets.
“I couldn’t see the VCE effort doing something like what Exadata does,” MacDonald says.
“We’ve taken part of the database code itself and we’ve put it in the storage device.
That would be very difficult for VCE to deliver because it would require two or more companies sharing trade secrets that they might not be willing to share.”
He says Oracle has “no vested interest” to force the database work on to the server.
“We can say it makes more sense to do some of the database acceleration into the storage or it makes more sense to build some of the flash acceleration into the database. HP and Microsoft will have to do it by cooperation and I think there will be areas they will have to compromise on. We don’t have to compromise.”
Making the integrated sale
Most vendors are moving to a converged strategy with similar sales pitches.
HP StorageWorks business manager Mark Nielsen says resellers should stop focusing on the server: “It’s all about applications running on our infrastructure”.
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