The ongoing war of words between execs at Amazon Web Services Inc. and cloud computing competitor Oracle Corp. continues, with the latest salvo launched today by AWS vice president and distinguished engineering James Hamilton in response to comments made Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd.
Hurd was quoted in Fortune earlier this month under the title “Oracle CEO”: We Can Beat Amazon And Microsoft Without As Many Data Centers. He claimed that Oracle has an advantage over AWS because of superior hardware, databases, and software.
Hurd was quoted saying, “If I have two times faster computers, I don’t need as many data centres.” “If I can speed-up the database, maybe one fourth of data centers is required. I could go on about the tech that drives this.
The Fortune article provided some context.
Oracle stated that it runs its data centers using Oracle Exadata servers. These turbocharged machines are fundamentally different from the barebones servers that other public clouds providers deploy in scale-out models. “The idea is that if one or two servers fail among thousands, as they will, the jobs are routed to still-working machines. It’s all about designing applications that can be easily redeployed.
“Oracle is banking on what techies refer to as a “scale up” model in which fewer but more powerful computers — in Exadata’s case each with its own integrated storage and networking — take on large workloads.
Hamilton retorted last week in a blog post titled “How many data centers are needed world-wide”
Hamilton’s lengthy post is full of numbers, facts, and references. It begins as follows:
Fortune asked Mark Hurd (Oracle co-CEO) how Oracle would compete in cloud computing. Their capital spending was $1.7B, while the total spending of the three cloud players was $31B. The question was: If you assume that the big three cloud players spend roughly equally, how can $1.7B be competitive with more than $10B when serving customers? It’s a good question, and Mark’s answer was interesting. “If I have two times faster computers, I don’t need as many data centres.” I might only need four data centers if I can speed up my database. “Of course, Oracle doesn’t have servers that are 2x faster than the big cloud providers. I would also argue that Oracle is not uniquely positioned to offer’speeding up database’. All major cloud providers have substantial database investments, but that won’t change the fact that successful cloud providers must offer large multi-national data centers to serve the world. Hurd’s offhand comment raises an interesting question about how many data centers international cloud service providers will need. Hamilton also discussed “N+1 redundancy” as well as a variety of technical statements. He concluded by saying that while we all will work hard to eliminate any unneeded infrastructure investment, there will not be any escaping the huge data center counts and the billions these deployments will incur. There is no shortcut and massive deployments are the only way to provide excellent cloud services worldwide.
Hamilton and Hurd are not the only combatants in this war of words.
CNBC published an article entitled “Amazon cloud chief jabs Oracle” just before the above exchange began. CNBC’s article reports on comments made at the recent AWS Summit by Andy Jassy, chief of AWS. The article begins:
Amazon and Oracle don’t get along well.
