Oracle empowers the future of Grid Computing (page 2 of 2)

Given the current economic climate, today's enterprises are focused on affordability, looking for ways to cut costs and spend less while doing more. By increasing the efficiencies of processes and systems, grid computing does exactly that. Grids increase resource utilization, promote hardware consolidation, and eliminate islands of underutilized computers. Instead, grids create centralized pools of processing power, allocating resources on a priority basis—when you need power, there it is.

Hardware vendors are selling "blades"—a circuit board with memory, CPU, and hard disk, designed to take up as little space as possible in a rack-mounted chassis. Blades offer the lowest cost computing power, sometimes as much as 80 percent less than SMP. Grouped together, blades are the most efficient, scalable form of commodity computing. These "blade farms" are the most cost effective form of commodity clusters, which Oracle believes is the future architecture of computing.

In software, the growth of Linux continues to outpace all other operating systems combined. And while Linux can't scale to SMP, it runs quite well on blades with, say, four CPUs. Commodity clusters work well on Linux, and the larger the blade farm, the greater the Linux price advantage.

But these advances in hardware and operating systems alone are not enough. Software vendors have to provide the right infrastructure to let you run your applications on this new platform. And, this infrastructure has to allow you to dynamically allocate resources to match your business priorities.

Oracle Grid Technology and Oracle9i Database with Real Application Clusters
For Oracle users, the Grid is here today. You can move your ERP applications to these new platforms without changing them, thanks to Oracle's database clustering technology, Oracle9i with Real Application Clusters.

Oracle9i Real Application Clusters allows a group of independent servers to cooperate as a single system, with three primary components—processor nodes, a cluster interconnect, and a shared disk subsystem. The clusters share disk access and resources that manage data, but the distinct hardware cluster nodes do not share memory. Oracle9i with Real Application Clusters provides improved fault resilience, higher availability, and more economical growth versus single SMP.

And with respect to grid computing, Oracle's clustering technology runs on blades or commodity clusters. Other database vendors recommend that their databases run on SMP. Oracle lets you use the lowest cost hardware, and you can run real applications; Oracle9i Database with Real Application Clusters is the only cluster database certified by SAP.

Oracle's database clusters can dynamically add CPUs or remove CPUs from a database while the database is running. You can change CPU allocations to databases in response to load or management priorities, dynamically allocating resources to suit your application needs.

Oracle9i Database lets you share information and messages, publish and subscribe to information, and replicate and copy data, all with a single mechanism.

Oracle portability gives you an easy migration path and protects your investment. You can take an application developed on SMP and easily move it to a Grid computing environment. Oracle9i Database uses the exact same code base on all platforms, ensuring consistent behavior and APIs. You don't have to rewrite your application to get started with the Grid.

Oracle Grid Leadership
The Grid is exactly in line with the long term strategy and objectives of Oracle: Cluster database, commodity hardware, portability, centralization, economies of scale, and Unbreakable. The Grid goes to the core values of Oracle. So Oracle is uniquely positioned to play a leadership role in the move to Grid computing.

We think this next phase of computing is going to offer great benefits, with no tradeoffs. You'll get lower costs, better information, higher productivity, and more computation. We think companies that adopt these technologies and ideas are going to gain a real competitive advantage, and Oracle users can get started right now.


Benny Souder is the Vice President for Distributed Database Development, Database and Application Server Technologies, for Oracle Corporation.