Dear Sunshiners......
Nice to see the usual Anonymous Sun Marketeers propping up their fantasies again. Did you happen to forget that the first time round, Oracle asked hp to take the hardware bizz part of Sun as they didn't want it? Oh, you do remember the joint hp-Oracle offer? Just trying to ignore the very clear writing on the wall, I see.
As to the hp-Oracle relationship, hp is Oracle's #1 partner - more Oracle instances go on more hp servers than any other vendor, in fact it is touted by Oracle to be close to 50% of all Oracle instances are on hp kit, so I can't see Oracle letting the surviving Sun employees get in the way of that nice little earner.
What I can see is Oracle now turning round and off-loading the Sun hardware bizz to hp so hp can pillage the accounts and transfer all those dire SPARC and Galaxy servers out for Integrity and ProLiant. Winners all round - well, except for the frothing Sunshiners. Even Oracle are only promising to "Protects massive customer investment in SPARC" - that sounds like providing support until EOL, not continued development. Where's the commitment to release Rock or include the next gen of SPARC64? There isn't one, beacuse Oracle have no intention of lumbering their business with a massive loss-maker like SPARC. And everyone is reading that for exactly what it is - SPARC has just got its death certificate.
Oracle will settle quickly with NetApp, they do far too much business with NetApp as the storage device for their DB and won't want to p*ss off NetApp. Since you can't put the genie back in the bottle, Oracle will probably come up with some restrictive licence for non-business users, and pass the rest over to NetApp to screw over for a WAFL licence fee. Bye-bye Sun storage!
And don't start hoping Fujitsu will magically buy up the Sun hardware bizz, they've already said they don't have the cash or the desire to. At best, you can hope Fujitsu manage to transfer some of those Sun accounts onto SPARC64 so you can get a few more years of Slowaris before it all goes. The SPARC64 chip, whilst better than any Sun SPARC chip, still isn't good enough to beat Power and Itanium in the long run.
Which leaves the software. Slowaris x86 is just a profits blackhole, and Oracle already know how hard it is trying to push a Linux clone. I suspect Slowaris x86 will live on as a means to migrate SPARC customers off to x86, but via other vendors kit. I can see Oracle trying to flog on the Galaxy servers to someone like Lenovo, but otherwise I can't see Oracle keeping them. They don't need the aggro of going up against hp, IBM and Dell, all of which have already trounced Galaxy. Glassfish isn't needed, we've already covered ZFS, so what's left? Java and MySQL.
So Oracle just spent $7bn for Java and MySQL, so expect some interesting licensing deals soon! MySQL may survive as a cheap-to-free alternative to fight low-end MS SQL, but expect it to remain relatively feature-free to make sure it doesn't steal sales from real database products like Oracle DB. I can only really see Oracle making any real investment into Java. The rest of the albatross will be carved up and sold off to claw back some of that purchase price.
Hard luck, Sunshiners. You can go back to selling double-glazing now.