Oracle is using its Openworld conference to promote what it sees as
an underused feature of its Oracle9i database: Real Application
Clusters.
The database giant highlighted testimonies from a handful of
companies that are using the technology, and unveiled partnerships
with server manufacturers designed to make it easier for customers
to deploy the technology.
Introduced in June with the launch of Oracle 9i, the clustering
feature lets customers install a database across two or more
servers linked together.
"The benefit of a clustered system is that you can add or take away
nodes as your needs dictate," said Carl Olofson, programme director
at analyst firm IDC. "High availability is also key because of the
pressures to build computer systems that are available all
day."
Complex issue
Oracle admits that customers have been slow to adopt clustering,
partly because they are afraid of the complexity. The company's
first attempt at the technology, delivered in 1997 with Oracle 8i,
was hard to manage and did not offer the transactional processing
performance some customers needed, acknowledged Ken Jacobs,
Oracle's vice-president for server technologies.
However, Oracle thinks it has got it right this time, and the
company spotlighted a handful of customers that have decided to use
Real Application Clusters.
Acxiom, which manages data warehouses for banks, retailers and
other businesses, turned to 9i's clustering to reduce server
downtime and improve the availability of its customers' data, said
Tim Donar, Acxiom's senior systems architect.
The company began clustering in 1997 with Oracle 8i and recently
implemented the latest version on two Compaq servers, each
populated with about 20Tbytes of data, he said.
"We ran some of the standard data warehousing tests and saw about a
38% improvement in performance [with Oracle 9i over Oracle 8.17],"
Donar said.
FreeMarkets, which hosts online marketplaces for buyers and
sellers, tested the 9i clustering feature for two months and went
live with it in November.
The switch helped reduce the time it takes to failover from one
server to the next by about two seconds, down to three or four
seconds, said FreeMarkets vice-president John Benzinger.
Hardware savings
Vector SCM, a subsidiary of General Motors that manages the car
maker's supply chain infrastructure, will switch to Real
Application Clusters early in 2002 because it sees it as a way to
add capacity using relatively low-cost servers.
The company expects the switch to bring it about £1m in hardware
savings, according to David Brown, Vector's integration and
emerging technologies architect.
Despite the customers lined up here, Olofson said it was too early
to say if the benefits of Real Application Clusters will be as
great as Oracle claims. It is also too soon to say whether Oracle's
"shared-disk" method of clustering servers will serve customers
better than the "shared-nothing" approach being pursued by IBM,
NCR, Microsoft and others, he said.
The different approaches have to do with how data is stored across
a cluster. "Shared nothing tends to be more appropriate for use
with large, complex databases where you have a lot of unpredictable
queries, such as data warehousing," Olofson said.
On the other hand, Oracle's shared-disk approach typically favours
environments that support a high volume of transactions occurring
quickly, like those performed by e-commerce applications and other
Internet business software.
"I think what Oracle is betting on is that there's going to be a
growing need for systems that provide transaction processing
support for these types of Internet applications," Olofson
said.
Price cuts
Real Application Clusters are benefiting from a dramatic reduction
in the cost of hardware components, as much as Oracle's
technological developments, said Olofson. Price cuts are making it
far more economically viable for even medium-sized companies to
build clusters, he said.
Oracle is pushing clustering because it sees it as a way to
differentiate its database from IBM and its other rivals, Olofson
said. Oracle claims it is the only vendor to support clustering
"out of the box" for business applications from SAP, Siebel Systems
and PeopleSoft.
IBM refuted the claim and said it has also worked with those
vendors to allow their applications to run in clustered
environments using the company's DB2 database. "Oracle seems to be
the only one who thinks shared nothing is bad," said Jeff Jones,
director of strategy with IBM's data management solutions
group.
To make it easier for companies to get up and running with a
clustered system, Oracle announced on 3 December partnerships with
Dell and Sun. Both will offer customers pre-configured and
pre-tested systems running Oracle's clustering software.
Sun will offer the technology with its Sun Fire 280R servers and
Storedge T3 arrays through value-added resellers starting later in
December, the company said. Dell will offer the clustering software
on pre-tested servers running Windows and Linux in the US from
January, with a worldwide offering to follow.
Oracle already announced a similar partnership with Compaq earlier
in 2001.