
How Many Data Centers Needed World-Wide (2017) - rfreytag
https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/04/how-many-data-centers-needed-world-wide/
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el_caro

      ...don’t believe that Oracle 
      has, or will ever get, 
      servers 2x faster than the 
      big three cloud providers.
    
      ...also would argue that 
      “speeding up the database” 
      isn’t something Oracle is 
      uniquely positioned to 
      offer.
    

Why is that so unreasonable? I can definitely imagine Oracle engineering a
different kind of cluster, that could optimize for better throughput, and more
efficient storage.

An RDBMS company is going to attack problems differently, and supply different
services. They aren't hosting video content to support properties like
YouTube, or photo sharing. They aren't virtualizing compute environments like
Amazon. They aren't running Xbox gaming networks like Microsoft.

They operate business platforms, and SQL DBA tasks often optimize for high
normalization of data. They run a proprietary network stack:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Net_Services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Net_Services)

So, take all of this together, and a lot of bloat is trimmed from computing
demands.

Their spend being 1/10th of other providers probably has a lot to do with who
they deliver for. Consumer computing is pretty wasteful, in ways that business
operations are not.

Sure, Oracle can't operate systems that exceed the speed of light, and
probably doesn't have access to CPU architectures radically different from the
rest of the industry, but based on those broad sweeping statements, it doesn't
seem impossible that Oracle operates in ways other providers don't.

~~~
mmt
> a different kind of cluster, that could optimize for better throughput, and
> more efficient storage

It doesn't even require all that much imagination, considering how anemic the
storage IO choices are under AWS. Until recently, EBS was connect by 10Gb/s
ethernet. Now, I believe the best is 40Gb/s ethernet, but even that's not
ubiquitous and is only equivalent to single 4-lane SAS3 connection. Local (to
the node) storage options are extremely limited.

The typical cloud provider model seems geared toward scaling "out", even
_before_ scaling "up" (while price:performance effective), which, of course,
is a great way to maximize revenue. For a user/customer, it's terrible for
cost and for performance, but this doesn't seem to bother VC-funded startups,
for example.

Whether Oracle has the knowledge already or is able to hire that knowledge to
create such a different offering is an open question, as is if there are
enough customers who care enough to pay for it.

