Oracle pledges 'x86 economics' with new Sparc servers

Larry Ellison doesn't do "cheap." The Oracle chairman isn't interested in selling the low-cost one- and two-socket servers that make up a huge slice of the server market but yield little profit for the companies that make them. Even if he did, that business is pretty much sewn up by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell and the "white box" makers from China and Taiwan.

But Ellison's also a realist, and he knows customers are gradually turning away from his pricey Unix systems in favor of x86 boxes to build scale-out private and hybrid clouds. So to keep customers interested in Sparc, Ellison needs to come downmarket and provide more affordable options.

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