Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

blogs.sun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 69 posts

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#41

Post by barrkel »

hga wrote: post #26
mhd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly know how to sell their database. Whether this translates into an equal success with their Sun IP has to be shown. The good thing for them is that they acquired pretty mature products, so they can probably "coast" along and still make a reasonable profit. It's still open whether they can foster enough innovation to keep things going with Java, Solaris… Their track record isn't very good in that respect.…

ZFS, however, is not in that category, and everything I've heard says that it needs more work and a lot more polish.

You should try putting it through its paces before coming to that conclusion; I've heard different things from other people, and I currently use it for my media storage.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#42

Post by VladRussian »

mrb wrote: post #40

Oracle's strategy seems to be: (1) Don't bother investing too much in R&D or figuring out the next big technology, just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun, BEA, Hyperion, Sieble, Innobase, PeopleSoft...). (2) Immediately execute massive layoffs to increase profits even more. And suck every dollar possible out of the business for a couple years. (3) After a while, the profits will start decre…

"just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun, "

don't know about the rest in your list, can you specify what do you mean saying "profitable" in application to Sun?

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#43

Post by ww520 »

alecco wrote: post #12
ableal wrote: post #3

His Nov.2009 blog entry on ZFS data deduplication is a pretty good primer: http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup P.S. also, the 2008 pics with Linus. I suppose there is no further story to go with those ...

IMHO, with my little work in compression, all that dedup stuff was a bit hyped. And BTW it is older than ZFS, at least Plan 9's network storage had the same feature. But alignment kills looking for matching chunks of data. And "generally best left to the application" sounds like a cop-out.

It's the ease of usage, speed, and very large compression window that makes dedup better than traditional compression.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#44

Post by wnoise »

masklinn wrote: post #15
etherael wrote: post #5

Did Oracle buy Sun to strip it and liquidate the intellectual assets? What's their plan here? It seems like they have zero interest in building the products.

Oracle bought Sun to make more money.

That's clearly the "why". He (and I, for that matter) want to know "how".

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#45

Post by hga »

barrkel wrote: post #41
hga wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZFS, however, is not in that category, and everything I've heard says that it needs more work and a lot more polish.

You should try putting it through its paces before coming to that conclusion; I've heard different things from other people, and I currently use it for my media storage.

The problem is that for this type of thing credible reports of failure carry more weight than reports of success. If you're making a big bet on the reliability of file system you want to mitigate risk, and for all I know either you haven't tickled a bug I would or you've just been lucky so far.

When I looked hard at this 2-3 years ago, it was clear to me that without a tape backup system I couldn't justify purchasing, ZFS just wasn't there yet. I've heard nothing since them to convince me it has been sufficiently polished to get over my threshold or required reliability.

ADDED: I don't think it can be said that ZFS is established to the same degree that the parent's examples are (Java, BEA and Oracle's DB).

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#46

Post by iuyfgtrghjk »

melling wrote: post #9
etherael wrote: post #5

Did Oracle buy Sun to strip it and liquidate the intellectual assets? What's their plan here? It seems like they have zero interest in building the products.

Oracle is a consistently profitable company. They know how to run a business. They know what they're doing. If the old Sun and their culture wanted to survive, they needed to run a better business.

I suspect somebody said the same thing about GM or Chrysler

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#47

Post by iuyfgtrghjk »

hga wrote: post #28
Nate75Sanders wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply profiting does not mean that you're playing the game optimally. While small organizations can't afford a research division, Oracle certainly can. You'd think a company in the business of storing data might want to keep the guy who created ZFS, especially given how lively the database world is right now with NoSQL implementations, etc.

Based on what James Gosling has said, perhaps Oracle's general HR policies just aren't compatible with retaining people at Jeff Bonwick's level. There could also be bureaucratic turf wars going on, i.e. the total loss of autonomy/decision making power that Gosling reported suggests that those already in Oracle are happy with how they run things and have no intention of sharing those responsibilities. One can also ima…

This happens everytime a company is taken over by a larger one. Except for a few VPs who are part of the M&A team - everyone at the smaller company always ends up beneath the same person at the larger one.

Everyone in tech knows this - which is why everyone who can leaves before a 'merger'. And why you never hear of the innovative smaller company's work 6months after the takeover.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#48

Post by iuyfgtrghjk »

wnoise wrote: post #44
masklinn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle bought Sun to make more money.

That's clearly the "why". He (and I, for that matter) want to know "how".

Because the alternative was that IBM or HP would buy Sun - or they would simply disappear.

The result (in either case) would be a lot of IBM hardware salesmen crawling over Sun's customers saying things like: If you want to switch to DB2 to go with your new IBM servers we can do you a deal.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#49

Post by iuyfgtrghjk »

gruseom wrote: post #35
nailer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, really. PMs would publicly mock new-to-IBM PMs who used mid-90s business speak. When I was there they also referred to layoffs as 'getting rid of people'. It was a pretty good environment - honest and respectful. Perhaps your office was different.

That's extraordinary and not at all what I would have expected from IBM. I wish there were more places where people ditched corporate doublespeak. Especially that vile phrase "human resources". Soylent Green is human resources.

Any place that has any kind of "employee valuation policy" doesn't value their employees.

Re: Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle

#50

Post by VladRussian »

during recent years Sun was like an aircraft carrier steered by (actually with all the systems controlled by) a bunch of monkeys - a lot of noise and jerking right an left. When finally it was grounded and started to sink, its crew was saved by another ship.

Why it so surprising that ones who grounded the carrier didn't get to steer the rescuing ship?

Post reply on HN