Oracle and Linux win over NZX

By ADAM GIFFORD

NZX - the New Zealand stock exchange - has become the first major New Zealand company to adopt the Oracle 10g database running on Red Hat Linux.

Apart from being able to consolidate 21 databases into one, the new NZX system runs faster, more reliably and at less cost, says the company's tech team.

One key query - searching the data on historical trades to identify maximum trade values - has been cut from 36 seconds to 0.03 seconds.

Chief information officer Chris Corke said NZX saw itself as a commercially innovative organisation and it was important to continue to identify the best tools to meet its needs.

Oracle chief executive Charles Phillips told the Oracle Open World user conference in Melbourne last week that if IT chiefs wanted better performance, they had to be prepared to spend less - that is, drop their proprietary Unixes and expensive multiprocessor boxes and go to Linux on clusters of two-processor or four-processor servers.

"We went for Linux, not just because we hated Microsoft, but because the cost was compelling," Phillips said.

"It is clean code, small, not a lot of overhead. That is where we are going in the next three or four years. You have to be there."

Few New Zealand organisations have heeded the message so far, despite the country's reputation for being both cost conscious and an early adopter of technology.

New Zealand's addiction to the Microsoft drug - seemingly low sticker price, ready access to people with the necessary skills - means Linux adoption seems to be slower in this country than elsewhere, especially Asia.

Oracle is trying to change that.

If the world goes Linux, Oracle won't need to spend so much making sure its technology can run securely and reliably on every weird combination of hardware and operating system its customers adopt.

"We can't support unlimited configurations, so we say if you give up some choice, we can make it more secure," Phillips said.

Linux in effect gives Oracle its own stripped-down operating system, one it doesn't have to pay for and which leaves customers with more money to pay for Oracle software.

"We don't need a large operating system. We just want to communicate with memory and disc, the I/O [input/output] system," Phillips said.

"We have been taking other people's stuff out. The fewer third parties are in a solution, the more reliable it is."

According to research firm Gartner, Oracle accounts for 69 per cent of enterprise relational databases running on Linux.

Its Real Application Cluster (RAC) technology, which allows the database to be split over multiple processors, is a significant innovation.

Ken Jacobs, one of Oracle's most experienced database gurus, said it took 15 years to achieve.

"To the application, it looks like one. That is what makes it scale," Jacobs said.

Throw in more servers and the system runs faster. And using the clustering architecture Oracle calls its grid, server resources are dynamically allocated.

Until 2001, if you wanted to run a large database, you bought a large expensive machine with lots of processors and an expensive operating system to stop it falling over.

Oracle worked closely with all the major hardware vendors who made the big Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) boxes and the proprietary Unix operating systems and middleware to make them run properly.

RAC uses standard Intel-based servers which can be bought cheaply from companies such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Oracle has developed a close relationship with Dell, such that it is now the largest US reseller of Oracle software.

* Adam Gifford attended Oracle Open World as a guest of Oracle.