Guild Companies

Database vendor Oracle, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat, and server vendor Hewlett-Packard last week announced that they have teamed up to deliver ready-to-run clusters based on Oracle's Real Application Clusters middleware for Oracle 9i and running on Red Hat's Advanced Server and HP's ProLiant DL580 servers. Real Application Clusters is new the cluster-enabled version of Oracle 9i that employs clustering technology from HP's Tru64 Unix operating system, with features that have been ported to Linux with Red Hat's help.

Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RACs), which was developed in conjunction with Compaq for the past two years under the code name "Project Huron" and delivered to the market on Tru64 Unix at the end of last year, takes some of the smartest clustering technology ever invented and weaves it into the Oracle database. The VMS VaxCluster software developed by Digital Equipment Corp in the 1980s and 1990s and ported to Tru64 Unix in the late 1990s, before Digital was acquired by Compaq, has some of the best load balancing and load sharing code in existence, and is one of the reasons why HP bought Compaq. Compaq, wanting to get an edge over its competition in the Windows, Unix, and Linux corporate cluster market, licensed much of this core technology to Oracle a few years ago because it knew that clustering software was a bottleneck and was limiting the adoption of clustered databases. Compaq reckoned that it would win market share if it gave Oracle the Tru64 clustering technology to put into the Oracle database, and HP is betting the same thing as it works with Oracle and Red Hat to create a Linux implementation of Oracle 9i RACs. Oracle is similarly motivated to have its databases cluster-enabled in a more sophisticated way than is possible using databases from IBM, Microsoft, and others.

The Oracle, Red Hat, and HP have worked together to deliver cluster nodes for Oracle 9i RACs based on the ProLiant DL580 server. This machine is a 4U rack-mounted server that employs Intel's 1.4 GHz or 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 Xeon processor. With the Tru64 implementation, four-way ES45 AlphaServers were the target platform for RACs, and the Linux implementation is based on the four-way DL580 machines. The Linux-based Oracle 9i RACs are running Red Hat's Advanced Server, the recently released implementation of Linux from that company that is optimized to run on four-way and eight-way SMP servers. Oracle, HP, and Red Hat have tested and certified RACs running on an eight-node cluster of these four-way DL580 machines. The most recent DL580s, the so-called G2 versions that were only announced a few weeks ago, can each support up to 32 GB of main memory; they use the ServerWorks' Grand Champion HE chipset. The prior generation of DL580 servers use the ServerWorks ServerSet-III HE chipset, and support up to 16 GB of main memory and up to four 700 MHz or 900 MHz Pentium III Xeon processors.

Red Hat Advanced Server supports eight-way SMP servers, the three partners could in theory deliver Oracle RAC nodes on the eight-way DL760 servers, which use the 900 MHz Pentium III Xeon processors. It is unclear if clusters based on the DL760s would offer better performance or value than clusters built on the DL580s. It could be that the DL580s offer about the same performance at a lower price, which is why the RAC nodes are not available on DL760s even though Red Hat and Oracle support such machines with their software and HP delivers such machines in the ProLiant line. Pricing for the RAC configurations running Linux on HP DL580s was not available as we went to press.

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