LinuxWorld: Ellison touts Oracle Linux clustering

InfoWorld - Oracle Corp.'s Linux embrace includes running Oracle.com and its internal mail system on the open-systems platform, but don't expect the company to make its database open source anytime soon.
Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison said during his keynote speech on Wednesday at the LinuxWorld Expo & Conference in San Francisco that he supports Linux because it's "cheaper, faster and more reliable than any other environment around."
"Linux is making its way into the enterprise, and more and more companies are going to be relying on it for processing mission-critical data," Ellison said. "I don't think we've had a single technology take off as rapidly as our clustering on Linux."
Internally at Oracle, "we're moving aggressively, not just to jump on the Linux hype bandwagon, but we're actually using Linux to run our own business," he said.
Oracle is practicing what it preaches, according to Ellison. "By the end of this calendar year, literally all of Oracle's midtier [internal production] machines will be running Linux" for applications such as payroll, accounting, customer relationship management, sales force automation, marketing and human resources, he said.
However, the Oracle database won't be offered in an open-source format like Linux, because it's the one application that can't falter (see story). "It's the last thing that will go open source," said Ellison. "If your OS goes down, you reboot it. If your database goes down, you type in all the data again, which takes longer."
Ellison said Linux is ready for deployment in enterprise applications via the use of Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) technology, which provides reliability, scalability and security. Oracle, through its clustering technology, wants Linux to be faster, cheaper, more reliable and more secure than IBM mainframes, said Ellison.
"We let you build your own Linux mainframe out of a cluster of small Linux PCs," Ellison said.
He showed a slide that pointed out that a 32-processor Linux cluster running Intel machines costs about $350,000, while an IBM mainframe with comparable performance costs $14.8 million.
Any application that runs on the Oracle database can be deployed in a Linux cluster, he said. "You can take any of these applications, and that application will run on a cluster of Linux machines, totally unchanged. What will change is that application will run faster than it ran before," and more reliably, Ellison stressed.
Ellison said SAP AG has certified its software to run on Oracle clusters but not on IBM's. This, he said, "is strange, because SAP hates us and SAP's No. 1 technology partner in the world is IBM."
RAC technology can currently handle 16 network nodes easily, but it will be improved during the next year or so to handle clusters of 64 and 128 network nodes, Ellison said.
An IBM representative, in an e-mail sent prior to Ellison's speech, said IBM was the first database vendor to support Linux, back in 1999, and was also the first to support clustered Linux. The representative also saat IBM provides the industry's broadest support for Linux, via the DB2 database. Ellison, in his speech, said Oracle was the first to port its database to Linux.
During a question-and-answer session with the audience after his speech, Ellison said Oracle is on track to meet its quarterly financial expectations, and he denied that he ever called for a national ID card after the Sept. 11 attacks. But he said he did advocate the establishment of a national directory to keep track of potential risks such as people with terrorist backgrounds.
"The 9-11 terrorists, more than half of them were wanted by police or the FBI or CIA. Yet they were able to buy airplane tickets, walk into the airport and board the airplane" because information wasn't being shared, Ellison said.