Oracle has started to deploy grid computing technology
within the enterprise as a precursor to trans-datacentre
grids.
"10g delivers grid computing where resources under the database
can be controlled dynamically. The commercial attractiveness of
grid computing is there and enterprises are beginning to deploy
it," said Oracle Australia's director of technology and business,
Roland Slee.
"True grid computing is at the hardware and software level such
that in a virtual machine, which is made up of many machines, can
run applications transparently," he said. "This is why people speak
of a five to 10-year vision for the technology."
According to Slee, Oracle's vision embraces the idea of a
geographically dispersed datacentre which can be utilised wherever
and whenever needed.
"Although Oracle's grid technology does not go beyond the
datacentre, it is possible to take a piece, or all, of an Oracle
database and plug it into another grid which can be on another
architecture."
"An important distinction between Oracle's grid technology and
that in the realm of scientific research is that ours will run
business applications such as general ledger. Grid is the only IT
architecture that delivers information without limits or
trade-offs," Slee said.
"Today the system depends on the physical machine and can be no
more scalable," he said. "By building grid systems from low-cost
components the computing architecture is more flexible and with
fault tolerance is more reliable."
Oracle's 10g RAC scales to 64 nodes which Slee described as a
capacity which "exceeds real-world requirements".
Slee dismisses claims that Oracle's grid technology is limited
to 10g systems.
"Oracle has market leading capabilities with heterogeneous
databases," he said. "We have a mature and proven capacity to
integrate heterogeneous platform environments in a way that IBM has
never been able to. DB2 cannot do what 10g does and we can do grid
computing with heterogeneous data sources now."
Rodney Gedda writes for Computerworld Today