Intel chief executive officer Craig Barrett used his keynote
address to Oracle's Openworld conference to give the first
demonstration of the company's McKinley 64-bit processors running
Oracle Real Application Clusters.
Intel also announced an Oracle 9i Database developer release for
its Itanium Architecture to coincide with the speech.
With the products - for Linux64, HP-UX (Itanium) and Windows XP
64-bit platforms - the companies are attempting to encourage
application development for the 64-bit architecture.
McKinley chips are due to replace the Itanium platform next year,
and are currently being shipped to beta customers for
testing.
In the demonstration, Barrett showed how the McKinley processors,
in a four-node cluster configuration with Itanium and Xeon
processors, could enable a doctor to access patient records
securely using fingerprint recognition. The systems are designed to
scale to handle rich media, Web services and e-business
applications, he said.
According to Chuck Rozwat, Oracle's executive vice-president of
server technologies, the Web-based unified voice and e-mail
messaging system will be released to market early in 2002. The
product features a single interface for all messages and
technologies, such as text to speech recognition.
However, Barrett was forced to concede that challenges still face
enterprise IT managers.
He highlighted bandwidth limitations "at individual or enterprise
levels" as an inhibitor to macroprocessing projects, pointing to
the trouble companies such as Exodus and Excite@Home have had in
the depressed telecommunications sector.
But Barrett said developments like grid computing projects, the
evolution of enterprise applications that promote peer-to-peer
architectures, and Infiniband technology all helped drive the
company's macroprocessing vision.
Barrett said he remained relatively optimistic about Intel's own
fortunes despite the economic slowdown.
Other announcements from Openworld
- Sun announced availability of Oracle9i Real Application
Clusters Certified Configuration on the SunFire 280 server with its
StorEdge T3 Arrays. The pre-configured server and database
configuration is available via the reseller channel. Dell also
announced the Oracle9i Database Certified Configuration running on
Dell's PowerEdge 6400 server.
- Oracle announced that a number of customers had adopted its
database clusters, including American Airlines, FreeMarkets, Vector
SCM, Acxiom, Austrian Railways, Gas Authority of India, South
African Police Service and Verisign.
- Oracle announced the addition of the Oracle Certified Master
and Oracle Certified Associate programmes to complement the
existing Oracle Certified Professional qualification.