Source www.vnunet.com
By Gareth Morgan
vnunet
10th September 2003
Addressing delegates at the OracleWorld user conference in San Francisco, Ellison said the industry had been chasing the same dream of building bigger servers since IBM invented the mainframe in 1964.
But big iron presents problems of expense, the need for additional capacity, and single points of failure, he added.
Oracle's alternative is enterprise grid computing. Using farms of hundreds of low-cost two-processors servers, Oracle's 10g technology will improve performance and reliability at a much lower cost, according to Ellison.
"We're introducing the first real alternative in 40 years. And the shocking thing is, if you want to go faster you've got to be willing to spend less" he said.
"You're going to be getting 10 times the capacity at one-tenth of the price."
But Oracle must make sure that savings made on hardware are not wiped out by spending on database licences, cautioned Carl Olofson, information management programme director at analyst IDC.
"It's faced with a significant challenge here: it needs to compete in price-sensitive markets with Microsoft but without cannibalising its high-end business," he said. |