Grid computing is the IT industry's first new architecture
in 40 years, Oracle chairman and chief executive officer Larry
Ellison claimed as he formally launched the company's grid-enabled
database and application server.The 10g releases of Oracle Database and
Application Server enables customers to add computing capacity
simply by adding two-processor, Intel and Linux-based servers to a
grid of linked systems, Ellison stressed at the OracleWorld show in
San Francisco.
This is a departure from the traditional race
that has had system suppliers always trying to build bigger, faster
computers as the way to boost computing power, he said.
"There's no place to go if you have a
single-machine architecture," Ellison said. "Applications in the
information age are beginning to outgrow even the largest computer.
There isn't enough capacity."
"For the last 40 years it's been a quest to
build bigger and bigger mainframe computers," Ellison said. Even PC
leader Microsoft has joined the game recently by producing a
benchmark for its SQL Server database running on a 64-processor
Windows system, the Oracle chief noted.
With Oracle's grid approach, enterprises can
add capacity cheaply and have fault tolerance, identity management,
patch distribution and centralised monitoring of multiple systems
in a grid. Automatic load-balancing and provisioning also are
featured.
"After 40 years, Oracle is introducing an
alternative to the one-big-server approach to running your large,
mission critical applications, in fact, running all your
applications," Ellison said.
Oracle's grid approach features four central
components. A storage grid is attached to an array of database
computers, which is connected to a collection of application
servers. The fourth component, management, is provided by Oracle's
Grid Control software.
"It's all perfectly interconnected and all
managed as if it were one computer. That was a massive software
engineering feat," he said. Existing Oracle applications run faster
and more reliably on the grid, with no code changes necessary.
Software such as SAP applications can coexist on the grid, said
Ellison.
"It is a completely fault-tolerant grid made
up of inexpensive PC components with almost unlimited performance
and capacity at an incredibly low price," Ellison said.
Oracle plans to publish pricing of its 10g
products next week and the 10g versions of the database and
application server are expected to ship later this year.
Oracle's grid efforts stemmed from Oracle's
parallel server and Real Application Clusters technologies, Ellison
said.
Other suppliers offering a similar approach to
Oracle's grid plan include IBM, which is promoting its on-demand
strategy, intended to help customers transform business processes
while leveraging existing IT infrastructure, including hardware,
software and services.
Sun Microsystems's N1 architecture is a virtualising and
provisioning technology intended to provide for unified management
of data centre resources.
Paul Krill writes for InfoWorld