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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

Utterly stupid post from a company who should know better. The biggest reasons that companies buy expensive appliances is (a) data sovereignty and (b) ongoing support. The cloud e.g. AWS does have decent answers for this yet.

And the companies that are buying these types of appliances like we do couldn't care less about a few hundred thousand dollars.

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I think you are missing the point. They chose to deploy on AWS because the 'modestly priced' instances they are talking about are gigantically less powerful than Oracle's 'appliances'.

The article is about software, algorithms and modern database technology. Oracle has basically been flogging the same code base for twenty odd years, and claiming they are competitive by running their ancient, single node system on more powerful nodes. It is pure BS. Using a modern, distributed, in-memory store like MemSQL on crap nodes (AWS), still beats the pants off Oracle's ancient single node POS running on a super-computer.

> The biggest reasons that companies buy expensive appliances is (a) data sovereignty and (b) ongoing support

Don't underestimate reason (c): because some C-levels went golfing together.

That's actually more likely to be reason (a).

From TFA:

    ... $5/hr on Amazon or less than $20k if you wanted to buy 6 servers outright.

I actually read the article...

> The biggest reasons that companies buy expensive appliances is (a) data sovereignty and (b) ongoing support. The cloud e.g. AWS does have decent answers for this yet.

But they state that clients could buy 6 machines outright for just $20K if you didn't want to trust your data to AWS cloud. So while you can be negative on the cloud, but their solution seems pretty reasonable (cost and speed wise) for the use case presented -- I don't think it is "utterly stupid."

In terms of (a), why not build/host the cluster on your own gear?

For (b), how do you earn that trust other than continuing to try taking on customers and... well, supporting them?

Larry,

I thought you stepped down?

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