In case you missed it, Oracle has a ten million dollar challenge (here, here and here) to prove that their servers and database software technologies are 5 times faster than IBM.

Up to 10 winners open to U.S. Fortune 1000 companies running an Oracle 11g data warehouse on IBM Power system. Offer expires August 31, 2012 with configuration terms. See this URL for official rules: http://oracle.com/IBMchallenge.

Click here to view entry form or click on form below.

Taking a step back for a moment, if you forgot or had not heard, Oracle earlier this summer had their hands slapped by the US Better Business Bureau (BBB) National Advertising Directive (NAD) over performance claims and ads. IBM complained to the BBB that unfair marketing claims about their servers and database products were being made by Oracle (read more here).

Not one to miss a beat or bit or byte of data, not to mention dollars, Oracle has run ads in newspapers and other venues for the Oracle IBM challenge with the winner receiving $10,000,000.00 USD (details here).

This begs the question, who wins, the company or entity that actually can stand up and meet the challenge? How about Oracle, do they win if enough people see, hear, talk (or complain) about the ads and challenges? What about the cost, how will Oracle cover that or is it simply a drop in the bucket of an even larger amount of dollars potentially valued in the billions of dollars (e.g. servers, storage, software, services)?

Now for some fun, using an inflation calculator with 1974 dollars as that is when the TV show the six million dollar man made its debut. If you do not know, that is a TV show where an injured government employee (Steve Austin) played by actor Lee Majors was rebuilt using bionic in order to be faster and stronger with the then current technology (ok, TV technology). Using the inflation calculator, the 1974 six million dollar man and machine would cost about $27,882,839.76 in 2012 USD (364.7% increase).

Now using today's what Oracle is calling faster, stronger machine and associated staff for $10,000,000 challenge prize award, would have cost $2,151,861.17 in 1974 dollars. Note that the equal amount of compute processing, storage performance and capacity, networking capability and software abilities in 1974 similar to what is available today would have cost even more than what the inflation calculator shows. For that, we would need to have something like a technology inflation (or improvement) calculator.

Learn more about the Oracle challenge here, here and here, as well as the NAD announcement here, and the six million dollar man here

Ok, nuff said for now.

Cheers Gs

Greg Schulz - Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

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