Adam Gifford: Computing oracles preach the gospel

Success may have made Michael Dell a little smug, as he preached the virtues of standards-based computing to the thousands of IT professionals gathered for software giant Oracle's annual user conference.

Dell Computers has been a major beneficiary of Oracle's drive to move its databases and applications on to clusters of lower-cost hardware. That has been one of a number of technologies and trends which have made Dell number one in PC and server shipments and allowed it to grow market share and profits while competitors stand still or slip back.

What standards mean to Dell is making servers from high volume, low cost Intel chips and using Windows or Linux operating systems to drive them.

Those boxes can be made and shipped cheaper than the high-end servers from companies like Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard and IBM, which use proprietary chips and run on flavours of Unix.

Oracle's Real Application Cluster (RAC) technology, which was introduced last year, has allowed Dell to take on the proprietary server manufacturers in the data centre. Oracle's new database and application server, 10g (the g stands for grid computing), may accelerate the trend because it promises to treat multiple clusters and storage devices as a single virtual computer, offering lower prices and greater reliability.

Dell said many of his rival hardware vendors overrated the importance of what they spent on research and development, which didn't necessarily lead to higher profits.

It wasn't long before those rivals had a chance to hit back. Sun Microsystems' king Scott McNealy took Dell's attack on proprietary computing personally. He said Dell was a distribution company rather than a computer maker and its competition is actually Intel, because the chip maker will eventually favour the "white box" assemblers over the branded sellers. Sun's success in high-end computing is built on its Sparc chip and its Solaris operating system, an extremely powerful and robust version of Unix. In the last couple of years it has also started producing low-cost servers using Intel chips running Red Hat Linux.

McNealy said Sun's Intel-based servers came out of the same Asian factories Dell used with the same components, and cost US$41 ($70) less: "I think ours has a cheaper bezel." But drawing on his Detroit origins, he said a server on its own was as useful as a piston ring or carburettor.

What was more important was being able to put together the whole technology package, including reference architectures, so when a customer came looking for a system to run a particular application, they were given a solution rather than a pile of parts. That was what Sun offered and because it owned the technology it could deliver the whole package cheaper than competitors.

"So you have a choice between heaven or Dell," McNealy said.

The only thing Sun wouldn't sell you was a Microsoft operating system.

"We don't see the value in offering the Windows petrie dish. You can get infected in a lot of places. Michael Dell will ship you an infected computer, no problem," McNealy said.

Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina also emphasised her company's commitment to research and offered a reality check on the grid concept.

"Some people may be trying to ride this horse before they are ready," she said, a reference to Dell's recent riding accident which had him delivering his keynote from a chair.

Fiorina said grid computing was "more hype than reality" and was still three to five years from being useful to most businesses.

It would require a huge amount of innovation to automate the processes of a traditional data centre, right down to the detail like keeping computers from over-heating from the load placed on them.

HP already has many of the components and runs two of its data centres on the grid model. indeed, the Oracle clustering system is based on technology licensed from HP's Tru64 Unix.

Creating enterprise grid computing will be a community effort.

"The true grid is not homogeneous, it is not one vendor supplies all," Fiorina said.

"A nice RAC will only get you so far."

So how far will the grid get this time, given that its arrival in a variety of guises has been predicted repeatedly over the past few decades?

Oracle, Sun, HP, IBM and any number of smaller players have stuff in their labs which will assist in making computing easier to manage and will move processing further into the network.

For now Oracle is promising a grid within the enterprise - going outside those walls presents challenges of security, manageability and bandwidth which are for the future.

For New Zealand to benefit, more attention needs to be paid to its network infrastructure. As long as we are being overcharged for low quality, low speed bandwidth, we will have gridlock rather than grid.

* Adam Gifford attended OracleWorld as a guest of Oracle.

* Email Adam Gifford