By William Fellows
None of the partners Larry Ellison claims to have signed on to Oracle Corp’s Raw Iron database appliance server strategy have been willing to stand up and describe any product plans. Talks between them are said to be still at the conceptual level. The reason none of the vendors – Dell, Intel, Compaq, Sun and HP – have been able to spin any party line on Raw Iron is that they were apparently caught on the hop by Ellison’s disclosure of the product at Comdex. They had all – including Oracle – been hoping to build a marketing and PR campaign before going public. All said they were talking with Oracle but none would venture so far to say if or when a product might be available. The vendors’ hesitation is certainly understandable as Ellison’s chief target is Windows NT and running Oracle on servers without any recourse to Redmond software. Oracle is even suggesting a Raw Iron product CD could uninstall NT where it already exists on an Intel-based server. Ellison is talking about developing back-end database packages with the minimum hardware and software required to support an Oracle database. Other servers would host applications. A skinny microkernel instead of a fat server operating system will sit between Oracle8i and the silicon. Oracle has road tested FreeBSD, NetBSD, Plan9, a version of Solaris and Linux. It says it will pick the one that developers ask for in the final packaged product. The concept of dedicated servers is not a new one. Companies such as Network Appliance, Auspex and Cobalt Networks are already peddling servers dedicated to file serving.
