Linux means simpler administration

As data warehouses grow to multiterabyte levels, database management can become increasingly complex. Also if your architecture cannot support growth, the data warehouse can become unresponsive, unstable, and fundamentally unusable.

Oracle's solution to this quandary is to add self-managing and automation features to the server engine. Management of the complete Oracle environment, including databases, is achieved via Oracle Enterprise Manager, featuring Grid Control.

According to Oracle, this strategy simplifies the complete application lifecycle, from development and deployment to change management, configuration, day-to-day administration, and performance diagnostics.

Grid Control manages and monitors your entire deployment infrastructure, including database, middleware, and storage resources. With automated storage management, automated memory management, and automated backup and recovery and with complexity eliminated from many administrative tasks, customers can easily meet their service-level objectives—even when managing very large volumes of data.

In addition, administrators can treat clustered resources as basic management units, automating their start, stop, and monitoring as well as failover, relocation, and restart.

Vanderbilt University uses Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control to provision users, clone databases, and install software patches. These tactics are becoming increasingly important, as its data warehouse grows to serve all the university and hospital decision support needs.

'Our DBAs perform configuration, high-availability operations, recovery, and monitoring functions just once,' explains a senior department manager.

'Oracle Real Application Clusters then automatically distributes the updates to the appropriate nodes. Automated failover functions within Oracle Real Application Clusters eliminate many time-consuming manual processes,' Getsay continues. 'With Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, managing a 16-node database cluster is a lot easier.'

Dollars and sense

Companies initially looked toward clustered Linux solutions to reduce their IT costs and provide higher availability of their core transactional systems. Now many companies are realizing that the benefits of low-cost Linux clusters are equally applicable to their data warehouses.

A data warehouse built on a Linux cluster provides enterprise-level performance, scalability, and 24/7 availability at a very low cost. This is one of the reasons why Linux is making impressive inroads into the server market.

Forecasting by Gartner Dataquest in December 2004 estimated that Linux will ship on 21.8 percent of worldwide servers by 2008, up from 12.6 percent of worldwide server shipments in 2003.

Today's business intelligence systems are characterized by large and growing data warehouses supporting increasing user populations running ever-more-complex queries. Deploying a clustered Linux solution ensures that customers can easily meet their future growth requirements and guarantee service levels while keeping their cost of computing down. It makes sound economic sense.