27 september 2008
Larry Ellison, Chief Executive Officer van Oracle, heeft eergisteren bekend gemaakt dat Oracle een uitstap maakt naar de hardware business. Het is voor hem te hopen dat deze poging betere resultaten heeft dan Oracle's Network Computer van eind jaren '90. In zijn toespraak op Oracle Open World 2008 in San Francisco maakte Ellison de HP Oracle Exadata Programmable Storage Server en de HP Oracle Database Machine publiek. Beide zijn ontwikkeld door HP op het ProLiant platform. 'We need much more performance out of our databases than we currently get because information is proliferating at an astonishing rate and the disk storage systems of today cannot move the data off the disks into the database server fast enough', zo stelt Ellison. 'We had to go beyond software to solve the problem'. De Storage Server bestaat uit twee 'quad core' Intel processors, 12 harde schijven met samen 12 TB opslagcapaciteit en twee InfiniBand computerbus-sen die de data met en 1 Gbps snelheid verbinden met de datagrid. Het draait Oracle Parallel Query Database op Oracle Enterprise Linux. 'Support for other operating systems is on the way', zo zei Ellison. 'Unlike traditional storage servers, which pass disk blocks back to the database server in response to a query, the Exadata Storage Server only passes query results. Its built-in management application stripes queries across each of its disk drives so we search all the drives in parallel'. Die combinatie van benaderingen 'gives us very fast processing in the storage grid and reduces the traffic flow between the storage and the database grid', zo voegt Ellison er aan toe. 'The InfiniBand pipes can move data off the storage server at 5Gbps, but the limiting factor is the speed of pulling data off those disk drives, so we can only move data off them at 1 Gbps'.
Ellison zei dat HP en Oracle drie jaar gewerkt hadden aan de 'the world's fastest database machine', de HP Oracle Database Machine. 'This has eight Oracle Database Servers; 64 Intel processor cores; and runs Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle Real App Clusters'. Ellison positioneerde Oracle's hardwareplatform tegenover aanbiedingen van Netezza, die volgens hem B-Tree gebruikt 'which is old, I learned when I was in college', en tegeover Teradata. Deze beide partijen geven echter aan dat hun producten veel geavanceerder zijn dan die van HP. 'Our largest machine has 860 processors, so when we talk about massively parallel, it's considerably more massive than Oracle's', zo zegt Tim Young, Vice President Marketing bij Netezza. 'Netezza offers an applicance consisting of an SQL database stored on the disk rather than on the server, and up to 860 snippet processing units, each consisting of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and an IBM PowerPC chip running Linux', zo vervolgt Young. 'Whilst Larry says nasty things about us, the level of interest in Netezza since his keynote has skyrocketed. On Wednesday morning most people on the planet had never heard of Netezza and on Thursday morning thousands of people had heard of us'. Vergelijkingen kunnen dus ook in het voordeel werken van de partij die je negatief wilt laten zien. Young verwees Ellison's nadruk op de intelligente opslag die door de HP Oracle Database Machine geboden werd naar de prullenmand. 'A lot of the rich features that he talked about with regard to intelligent storage, indexing and caching, we just don't need', zo zei hij. 'We just handle tables and columns and that's fundamentally simpler to operate than a database like Oracle's which has thousands of objects'. Randy Lea, marketingdirecteur bij Teradata Products and Services vertelde dat de HP Oracle Machine geen effect op zijn bedrijf zal hebben, tenminste niet 'in any significant way'. Oracle 'has only come up with an intelligent disk subsystem to handle the inherent weakness Oracle has had over the years — doing full table scans'. Ellison's verklaring dat 'disk technology runs into problems in the 1Terabyte range is true only for Oracle', zo zegt Lea. 'We solved that problem 15, 16 years ago'. En over de InfiniBand verbindingen in de HP Oracle Database Machine: 'we aren't even close to the limit of the bandwidth of our technology, and we have some of the largest data warehouses in the world running our systems'. Volgens Lea kunnen Teradata's oplossingen 'go up to 4,096 servers connected in a grid, like the HP Oracle Database Machine. And, like Oracle's solution, every time we add a node, we add bandwidth, memory and disk capacity'. Oracle zal dus hard moeten werken om de overhand te krijgen.
