Oracle promises grid computing this year

By ADAM GIFFORD

Oracle says it is ready to bring grid computing - where unlimited numbers of computers are linked together as a single virtual machine - to businesses.

Chief executive Larry Ellison told the OracleWorld users' conference in San Francisco last week that the technology, in the form of the new Oracle 10g Database and 10g Application Server, would be available by the end of the year.

He said there would be a gradual move away from big mainframe-like servers costing between US$30,000 ($51,560) and $50,000 each, compared with less than US$3000 for a commodity server that could be used for grid computing.

Grid computing has been developing over the past few years within universities, mostly for scientific applications, but no one has previously been able to apply the theory to business environments.

The 10g enterprise grid builds on Oracle Real Application Cluster technology, which is sold as a way to tie together low-cost commodity servers such as those made by Dell Computers and give them the performance of high-end machines from companies such as Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

10g takes the concept further, bringing database servers, application servers, storage devices and networks under the control of automated management software Oracle is calling Enterprise Manager 10g. Pricing has not been released.

"The beauty of the enterprise grid is that our software creates the illusion it is just one big computer," Ellison said.

By treating all of an organisation's hardware as a single system, storage, database and application servers could be switched round to handle peak loads. For example, a machine bought to run a payroll system that might be used intensively only a few days a month could be switched to data warehousing or order entry applications the rest of the time without the retuning and testing now required.

Oracle said its management tools would eliminate complex, repetitive tasks such as performance diagnostics, application tuning and memory management.

The capability of the promised new software had database administrators asking if their jobs would be eliminated.

* Adam Gifford attended OracleWorld as a guest of Oracle.