Oracle Exec Half Right Regarding Appliances

Andy Dornan’s recent interview with Tim Shetler in Information Week caught my eye. At IBM Netezza we have long argued that Exadata is not an appliance – see our short video on operational simplicity – and a vice president of product management at Oracle agrees: "We don't call it an appliance because that suggests something that's relatively small or that requires very little administrative support," said Shetler.

You are half right, Tim. Merriam-Webster defines appliance as “an instrument or device designed for a particular use or function ‹an orthodontic appliance›; specifically: a household or office device (as a stove, fan, or refrigerator) operated by gas or electric current”. At IBM Netezza we design appliances for a particular use or function ‹data warehouse appliances›, to date these have all operated on electric current, but I’m not here to lock the valve on a gas operated future. The Dictionary’s phrase “designed for a particular use” implies “requires very little administrative support”; I whole heartedly agree with half Tim’s argument – because Oracle’s machine requires a dedicated team of administrators, Exadata is not an appliance.

I strongly disagree with Tim’s first supposition: that appliance suggests something that’s relatively small. Two petabytes are not relatively small. While Merriam-Webster’s definition includes the specific examples of household and office devices, the Dictionary doesn’t define appliance by scale, and neither do IBM Netezza and nor do our customers. In this video Christine Twiford, Manager of Network Technology discusses T-Mobile’s journey away from a forty terabyte Oracle data warehouse to exploiting two petabytes of data on an IBM Netezza appliance.

Back to Tim’s point that appliances require very little administrative support; Christine recounts that T-Mobile rely on the same team of three people to manage two petabytes as they did to manage one hundred terabytes at the start of their appliance journey. There is no supporting army of administrators busily patching software, configuring databases, and managing memory buffer pools; T-Mobile’s team comprises a principal engineer, a lead SQL developer, and a product manager who interfaces with the business. Technology supporting the business unobtrusively - this is appliance simplicity.