[ Thanks to Nobody for this link.
]
Oracle 9i is out
now, and Ken Jacobs of Oracle spoke briefly to the Register
about his company’s latest release, noting in passing that the
emphasis on clustering makes 9i an attractive proposition for
companies looking to use low-end and Linux-based machines.
“The big news is clustering, the Oracle Real
Application Clusters, that will take scalability and availability
in to new areas. It’s going to be a lot more cost effective for the
organisations that use our products too. This can be used to
deliver new levels of scalability to applications.- and no one can
compete with that.To be honest I’m pleased that [Microsoft and IBM] have been
talking about their clustering technologies because, with one look
at ours, people will see that our developments are far more
significant, we are offering transparent scalability. We are
reducing the cost of ownership considerably by enabling
organisations to cluster just about anything, Intel boxes, Linux
boxes, a multitude of configurations, and that saves the customer
the expense of running mainframes.IBM is in a desperate situation right now. DB2 is not gathering
ISV support, its Unix business isn’t as robust as ours and
mainframe sales are in jeopardy. IBM has support for DB2 from HP,
Sun and such like, but it can’t make substantial gains in this
(Unix) space for account management reasons. If a Sun salesperson
sells DB2 it opens the doors to IBM account managers who will come
in and try and sell IBM hardware – that’s not appealing. As such,
IBM might make a few percentage gains in the AIX space, which is
fine, but the rest will be a major struggle.”