Guild Companies

It's got to be irksome to the executives at the former Compaq, now part of Hewlett-Packard, that its main rival in the Wintel server market, Dell, can forge a strong alliance (as it did last week) with database and application software powerhouse Oracle based on the Oracle9i Real Application Clusters product line and the Linux and Windows platform. But it just goes to show you that loyalty is only skin deep in the IT industry.

Without the techies at Compaq--really the old Digital Equipment, which Compaq ate in 1998--who contributed a substantial and key set of clustering technologies to the RAC initiative, Oracle would probably still be trying to figure out how to cluster the Oracle9i databases that it can now peddle against Unix iron from HP. Larry Ellison, the CEO and founder of Oracle, says that it took his company ten years to figure out how to build fault tolerant, horizontally and vertically scaling database software, something he openly admitted again last week at the Dell Enterprise Event in New York. But what he doesn't say is that without Compaq's RAC alliance, Oracle would still be trying to figure out how to make clusters of small Windows and Linux servers scale as well as monolithic Unix and mainframe iron.

But, the way history and the RAC contracts worked out, HP doesn't really have much of an edge with Oracle9i RAC any more--it had a slight edge on AlphaServers when RAC was first announced, but with it available on ant Wintel or Lintel box, HP is just one of the many companies that can deploy RAC. HP will have to fight with Dell to get customers' attention and its share of their budgets. The RAC deal might have seemed like a good one at the time, but if Dell can use RAC-on-Linux to beat HP, IBM, and Sun over the head and compete against their profitable and more scalable Unix machines, then maybe in the long run it won't turn out to be such a good deal after all. The genie is out of the bottle now, so all of this speculative talk is meaningless.

Nothing made this more clear last week than the self-serving seals of approval that Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell and Oracle's Ellison both gave to Oracle 9i RAC. Both said that they run their respective $35 billion and $10 billion companies on Oracle RAC databases hosted on Dell's PowerEdge servers running the Linux operating system. There are plenty of executives who are saying that Linux is a niche, edge technology. These two are not among them. And they both claim that there is no need to go beyond Intel's two-way and four-way product lines using 32-bit Pentium and 64-bit Itanium processors because clustering works for scalability now that Oracle9i RAC has been tested and works.

Plenty of big mainframe and Unix vendors and shops would argue otherwise, but Dell and Ellison made a compelling argument in New York last week for Linux clusters, and not just because it will rile up chairman and founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates. Dell presented the statistics in his presentation to press and analysts--one of many he made for Wall Street over several days last week--and Ellison presented Oracle as a case study in moving to Linux clusters for real computing. When Dell talks about standardization, what he really is saying is "Intel" and related standards that are imported into that server platform. he also means Windows and Linux operating systems. In effect, Dell's use of the word standardization is akin to "popular." So saying that standardization is taking hold in the market is a bit strange.

What can be honestly said, and Dell went on to say this, is that Windows and Linux are the fastest growing server environments, moving from just over 55 percent of server shipments in 1996 to around 80 percent by the end of 2002. Linux, says Dell, is growing at 77 percent on servers right now. He rattled off some other interesting numbers, too. By 2004, according to surveys, 90 percent of companies will be using open source software of some sort or another in a mission critical capacity. He said that 90 percent of servers being sold right now are based on Intel iron, and that 68 percent of high-end machines are built on Intel iron. Some 71 percent of all databases are shipped for what he called industry standard hardware, which means Wintel and Lintel iron.

Perhaps most significantly, 70 percent of the companies that Dell talked to said that they would be implementing two-way and four-way Intel-based servers in their data centers, and that Dell has seen the market researchers revise their estimates for shipments of eight-way and larger servers downward as these smaller machines have gotten more powerful processors and clustering capability. Dell has a vested interest in showing that eight-ways might not be important, particularly since it is still trying to peddle the "Profusion" Pentium III Xeon machines as IBM, HP, Unisys, NEC, Bull, and others have announced more scalable and modern machines, some of them using 64-bit Itanium 2 chips because of the larger main memories they support. Dell sells a four-way "Merced" Itanium box, and has been mum on its exact plans for Itanium servers and more modern eight-ways than the PowerEdge 8450s.

Perhaps the most significant data that Dell divulged last week was some IDC numbers that show database software revenue on Linux servers growing at a compound annual growth rate of 97 percent between 2000 and 2006. This Linux growth, according to these numbers, will effectively flat-line the share of Windows servers running databases at around 40 percent, with Linux getting about 30 percent by 2006 and Unix and other platforms sharing the remaining 30 percent of the market. The IDC data shows the sales of database software on Windows platforms growing at a CAGR of 14 percent over the same 2000 to 2006 timeframe, and Unix/Other shrinking by 6 percent CAGR.

While Oracle could hardly be called a champion of open source, Ellison obviously takes delight in any situation that he can use to help push Oracle products and hurt Microsoft, and Lintel servers running Oracle9i RAC are a perfect thorn to stick in Microsoft's side. He relayed the story of how Oracle first rolled out Linux clusters in its demo center in Austin, Texas running Dell iron, and how the Oracle sales team objected - at first - to not having bigger Unix iron to demo on. As Oracle unplugged the Unix boxes, the sales team had no option than to test applications on the Linux cluster. And once they did, according to Ellison, they saw that the two-way and four-way Lintel servers clustered in the Austin center offered better performance than the Unix boxes. "The shocking thing that our Dell cluster demonstrated," quipped Ellison, "was that if you wanted higher performance, you had to be willing to spend less."

"A lot of people will argue that Linux is not as reliable as a big Unix box or mainframe," said Ellison. "I'm not going to argue with that, even if I don't believe that. But if one of our 24 machines at Oracle fails, we don't even notice, since we have 23 left. If you have a large-machine approach, and if that large machine fails, you're out of luck." He went on to say that the answer for high availability for big Unix and mainframe boxes was to keep a hot standby server, essentially a carbon copy of the production database machine that sits around, waiting for the primary to crash. This is obviously a lot less efficient than a distributed cluster, whether or not that cluster is based on Linux. It is also, however, a lot more familiar to the people who run data centers, who are going to take time moving to clustered solutions like Oracle9i RAC on Linux. But the economics of Lintel iron and software combined with examples like the experiences of Dell and Oracle themselves will lend credence to the idea that clusters can in many cases replace monolithic servers.

Dell and Oracle have been partners since 1998, when Dell really started to push into the enterprise arena with its PowerEdge servers. Since 2000, Dell's PowerEdge servers have been used internally by Oracle to develop the Linux versions of its eponymous databases, and since 2001, Dell and Oracle have shifted their own data processing to support the applications that run their businesses to Oracle databases running on PowerEdge servers running Linux. Last year, Oracle and Dell partnered on the unbreakable database on Linux promotion. Dell and Oracle have a partnership in the U.S., and that deal has been expanded to cover Europe and the rest of the world. Dell says that it has over 22,000 customers running Oracle databases on its servers, and by going global, it clearly wants to double or treble that number in short order.

As part of the alliance announced last week, Dell and Oracle will launch an Oracle9i Real Application Clusters setup running either Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (formerly Advanced Server) or Windows 2000 (and soon Windows 2003), complete with Dell|EMC CX200 or Dell PowerVault storage arrays for only $18,000. Under the deal, Dell Services and Oracle Consulting, their respective services arms, will partner on delivering services to help customers move from Unix and mainframe environments to PowerEdge servers running Windows or Linux and Oracle9i RAC. The services include a fast track from Unix to Linux as well as performance and capacity tuning. These services are available now in the U.S. and Canada and will be available in Europe, Asia, and Latin America later this year. As an example of pricing for these services, Dell said that a ten-day migration project porting an existing database to Oracle9i will cost $35,000.

Dell and Oracle are also working on future technology development projects together, and cited the testing of InfiniBand interconnect on dell PowerEdge servers running Oracle databases as an example. Oracle says that the prototype InfiniBand interconnect doubles the bandwidth between the clustered servers, which provides improved response times. With further tweaking, the two companies believe that InfiniBand interconnection fabric will, in the next several months, provide significant performance improvements (both response times and scalability), which is why the next major release of Oracle9i will support InfiniBand.