Oracle and Niagara
On the database front, Oracle continues to baffle customers with its bizarre fractional pricing scheme to handle the emergence of multicore chips. On the mainstream dual-core products available from Sun, IBM, Intel and AMD, Oracle requires customers to multiply their total core count by .75 to figure out per processor licensing costs. With the eight-core UltraSPARC T1, Oracle has adopted a .25 model, so each of the new Sun servers will be priced as if it were a two-way machine. That's quite a bonus for Sun and its customers.
Really good news. The T2000 is an capable database server too. But the old licencing scheme would be a little bit prohibitive when using Oracle.