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In addition, this approach meant we could take advantage of clustering to ensure high availability and redundancy in the architecture."

Linux and Oracle 10g Improvements
Not surprisingly, the CCC isn't the only organization using Linux to meet its enterprise requirements.

Ever since Oracle introduced its Unbreakable Linux program in 2002, enterprises around the world have been successfully deploying business-critical, enterprise-class applications on Linux. Now, with Oracle 10g, companies are taking Linux to new levels. Oracle 10g includes several enhancements that make deploying on Linux even more compelling, cost-effective, and higher-performing than ever before.

"Broadly speaking, with Oracle 10g, we have significantly improved our performance on Linux," says Jamshed Patel, senior director of the Linux Program Office at Oracle Corporation.

"Specifically, we've enhanced support for more memory, more CPUs, and for much better I/O performance for network-attached storage. Overall, it translates into superior performance, scalability, and reliability for customers."

Although these Oracle 10g enhancements have a direct impact on critical deployment characteristics such as performance and scalability, these Linux changes are less about adding new features and more about extending Linux's enterprise pedigree.

"With Oracle 10g, there were just a few enhancements made on the database side to make it work a little better with Linux," says Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux Engineering at Oracle Corporation. "Mainly because after a lot of experience with Oracle9i and a lot of customers' running it in production on Linux, we've found some more-detailed optimizations we can do."

But the improvements don't stop with Oracle 10g. As the Linux kernel continues to improve and the new Release 2.6 becomes available in future Red Hat and SuSE versions, Oracle Linux customers will benefit right away.

"When Red Hat releases Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and when SuSE releases SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, our products will already be certified for them," says Coekaerts. "So the second they come out from the vendor, we'll run on them." In fact, unless you're looking for NUMA [nonuniform memory access] support, it's likely that Oracle 10g Linux customers will simply be able to upgrade their Linux operating systems to gain the types of advantages expected from the next Linux kernel release (2.6).

"With the 2.6 kernel, the memory and hardware limitations that we have today will be gone," explains Coekaerts. "You'll basically be able to scale to the hardware's limits—you can support 64,000 disks instead of today's 255, or 64GB or 512GB of memory instead of today's 16GB or 32GB. Release 2.6 will also have hot-pluggable CPU support, so, on the fly, you can turn CPUs on and off or add and remove cards more easily.

All in all, it will be a huge difference in scalability. A large number of CPUs, a large amount of memory, a large number of disks—all those limitations we have today will pretty much be gone with 2.6, and Linux will be equivalent to all the high-end OSs out there."

Although enterprises will have to wait for future Red Hat and SuSE releases to reach those heights, there is an intermediate step available today for companies that want to push the Linux envelope. In addition to supporting Linux on 32-bit Intel systems, 64-bit Intel systems, and the S390 mainframe version, Oracle released a production version for AMD-64-based servers. "You get 64-bit capabilities out of the box at basically the same price as a 32-bit system," says Coekaerts. "So the restrictions you might encounter today to make large memory work will just disappear out of the box on an AMD-64 system.

It's important, because perhaps 70 percent of the problems we see are related to the memory-management problems of trying to do 64-bit-type work on a 32-bit system. So if you run on an AMD-64 or the new 64-bit Intel chip, those problems will just go away."