Sun and Oracle package licenses with servers

Firms cement twenty year relationship with bundle announcements

Sun and Oracle cemented their 20-year-old partnership last week by detailing plans to bundle Oracle database licences with Sun’s high-end servers.

The firms announced that high-end Sun Fire servers based on UltraSparc IV and IV+ processors will be offered with a free Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition database licence and one year of support. Subsequent support and maintenance will cost extra.

Though unlikely to swing procurement decisions, the move could give firms significant cost savings. The server bundle is likely to be available in the UK from the end of this month.

In a move perhaps designed to reassure customers that it has not hitched itself to Microsoft’s dot-Net architecture, Oracle also said it had taken out a new 10-year licence for Java. “The relationship is getting tighter,” said Jon Tutcher, Sun UK product marketing manager. “Oracle recognises Sun has brought out some unrivalled technology and that the Dell relationship is not going to deliver everything it wanted. There’s a swing [away from Dell] here.”

Sun and Oracle have long enjoyed a mutually-beneficial relationship but the axis seemed to have wobbled in the last few years. Oracle endorsed clusters of low-cost machines and Linux, and moved closer to Dell and Red Hat. For its part, Sun mocked Oracle’s initial stance on treating processor cores as full processors in its pricing.

Recently, however, the firms have patched up their relationship and in November Oracle made Solaris its preferred 64bit x86 open-source development environment.