Hints at Oracle's future

Now that Sun is part of the Oracle family, Oracle is working fast to capitalize on potential synergies. On Tuesday, both firms issued mirrored press releases inviting the public to attend a webinar that features Oracle's database platform running on Sun machines. This isn't all that new. What is new is that the machine takes advantage of Solid State Drives (SSD) that Sun has been working on for at least the past few years. SSD technology is faster than traditional disk-based storage, although it is significantly more costly.

What does this mean for enterprises? For small and mid-sized businesses, not much right now. In the next eighteen months, however, we should be seeing SSD technology start to make its way down the server and storage network food chain. And in three years or so, I'd expect to see it as an affordable and better alternative to conventional storage devices. At the same time, disk-based storage should begin to drop in price as SSD based devices encroach on their currently well-protected territory. This is good news for CIOs and CTOs in organizations that store large data sets. Examples include healthcare technology, video media, and social networking sites.

Keep a close eye on this. It should be kind of fun to see it all play out.

Credit where credit is due ...
Oracle event signals Sun hardware aspirations