Dell and Oracle have been partners since 1998, when Dell really started to push into the enterprise arena with its PowerEdge servers. Since 2000, Dell’s PowerEdge servers have been used internally by Oracle to develop the Linux versions of its eponymous databases, and since 2001, Dell and Oracle have shifted their own data processing to support the applications that run their businesses to Oracle databases running on PowerEdge servers running Linux.
Last year, Oracle and Dell partnered on the unbreakable database on Linux promotion. Dell and Oracle have a partnership in the U.S., and that deal has been expanded to cover Europe and the rest of the world. Dell says that it has over 22,000 customers running Oracle databases on its servers, and by going global, it clearly wants to double or treble that number in short order.
As part of the alliance announced yesterday, Dell and Oracle will launch an Oracle9i Real Application Clusters setup running either Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (formerly Advanced Server) or Windows 2000 (and soon Windows 2003), complete with Dell|EMC CX200 or Dell PowerVault storage arrays for only $18,000. Under the deal, Dell Services and Oracle Consulting, their respective services arms, will partner on delivering services to help customers move from Unix and mainframe environments to PowerEdge servers running Windows or Linux and Oracle9i RAC. The services include a fast track from Unix to Linux as well as performance and capacity tuning. These services are available now in the U.S. and Canada and will be available in Europe, Asia, and Latin America later this year. As an example of pricing for these services, Dell said that a ten-day migration project porting an existing database to Oracle9i will cost $35,000.
Dell and Oracle are also working on future technology development projects together, and cited the testing of InfiniBand interconnect on dell PowerEdge servers running Oracle databases as an example. Oracle says that the prototype InfiniBand interconnect doubles the bandwidth between the clustered servers, which provides improved response times. With further tweaking, the two companies believe that InfiniBand interconnection fabric will, in the next several months, provide significant performance improvements (both response times and scalability), which is why the next major release of Oracle9i will support InfiniBand.
Russell Holt, vice president of enterprise engineering for servers and storage, said prior to the launch that Dell was committed to re-entering the Itanium server market later this year – most likely when the Madison Itanium 2 chips are announced this summer, and that it was working with Intel to deliver an improved eight-way box later in 2003, probably based on the E8870 chipset and the Pentium 4 Xeon MP Gallatin processors. He was not at liberty to say, but Dell does not venture far from the Intel roadmap. Dell could, of course, ship an E8870-based machine right now – Unisys is selling a 16-way ES7000 Orion server based on the Intel chipset. Clearly, Dell is waiting for something, and it ain’t Christmas. It might be larger-cache Gallatin chips.
Holt is also general manager of Dell’s storage business, and says that as of this week, the company is manufacturing the entry CX200 storage arrays that are the fruit of its partnership with EMC that was forged last year. Dell said that in 12 months, it has gained 2,500 customers for the CX line of arrays, which include larger models (the CX400 and CX600) than the CX200 that Dell is making. Dell is selling the CX200 pre-configured for attachment to two PowerEdge servers and with three year’s of support for $19,500. timpm@computerwire.com
Source: Computerwire
