**Nobody Ever Got Fired For...**
“Nobody ever got fired for going with Big Blue (IBM)” was a key phrase a couple of decades ago. IBM had tried and proven technology in hardware and software to keep your IT resource working and your company on track. Sure, there were other products and competitors. But they were often rogue upstarts you wouldn’t bet your career on. Others were simply clones of IBM hardware, not different solutions. Obviously, I'm leaving out companies such as HP and DEC.. Thank goodness there are renegades. Companies like Google have far outpaced the capabilities of the mainframe and midrange clusters by utilizing hundreds of commodity machines and distributed software. Parallel is now the buzz word of the day. Microsoft was betting the power of the PC would grow to accommodate SMBs and with their Cloud technology, they have increased their scalability to a level that probably hasn’t been measured fully. Today we have modern upstarts competing for the enterprise in a new way. Perhaps the more recent phrases going out of mode are, “Nobody every got fired for going with Oracle or SQL Server.” Well, even on the PC neither of those companies have a corner on the market anymore. MySQL continues to grow as a big competitor as an SQL engine primarily because it can scale. The engine by itself may not be as powerful as SQL Server or Oracle on a single instance. But there are folks who are sharding their data across multiple MySQL nodes resulting in spectacular throughput. The TCO which used to run pretty much exclusively in the Microsoft court has slipped out and been taken over by open systems. MySQL on Linux is pretty hard to beat for performance per $. No, it doesn’t have a lot of the bells and whistles as a full blown SQL Server engine…but do we really need all that stuff. If I can shard y data across multiple SQL resources, why do I need partitioned tables? There are many other issues like this for which out of the box solutions are being developed or are available as Microsoft had with IBM 20 years ago. What do you think? Is Microsoft becoming the new IBM? How about SUN? Are they playing both sides of the fence, or controlling the open software in order to keep their high end software marketable? Share your thoughts by writing [email protected]. (tobtaylor[at]sswug.org)
