Ellison: Oracle's "whole business" will run on Linux

By "whole business", he means he's replacing three HP-Unix boxes that run the company's business apps with an Intel/Linux cluster. Ellison's prediction that big boxes are going to die is a trifle premature. IBM's Great Server Heist campaign comes to mind as a counter-meme.

A nice aside comes when you look at where this puts Microsoft in Server-Space. On one side, you've got the Big Boxes. You can't run NT on anything but Intel hardware, so Microsoft can't go there. On the other side, you've got the clusters of commodity Intel hardware. For NT servers, the OS licensing costs are quite likely going to approach the amount you're spending on hardware. That's a powerful incentive to go with Linux.

(It's also a rather loud warning to IBM and BEA's Java application servers. JBoss is at about the same stage today as Linux was when it hit kernel 2.0 - used by a lot of hobbyists, but with the big players looking down on it as untested, and missing several enterprise features. I have this feeling that it's only a matter of time.)