Oracle 10g on Open Power for Redhat Linux AS

[stevenriz]

Hi, does anyone know when a production version of 10g will be available for Redhat Linux Enterprise AS v3? They are still on the developer's release. This is the only information I can find.

http://www.oracle.com/partnerships/campaigns/ibm/powerlinux/ibmpowerbasedlinuxsod.pdf

Thanks!
Steve

 

[DBAwhosaysNIE]

just out of curiosity why do you want to run Oracle on that stack (linux on POWER)? I'm certainly not anti-POWER and am very pro-linux (have run Oracle in production on it for > 4 yrs) but from my experience if you're on a platform outside their "core" you're pretty much on your own for support.

just curious...

sincerly,
your friendly neighborhood SuSE/Opteron evangilist ;-)

 

[stevenriz]

Well good question and the answer is nothing more then we are pro-RISC and pro-IBM now. the higher ups love seeing a name brand in there. We're moving from sparc servers which I Loved but the focus here was to move everything to open source and Linux. The speed of these power PC servers are incredible and once we realized the chips in the open power 720 was the same as their more expensive AIX systems we jumped on it. The only difference is the server can only be purchased with Redhat, not AIX. It's a great server. The rest of our infrastructure are all xeon based IBM systems. I would agree with you on the support but IBM, which is more of a support company then they are a hardware manufacturer, has a dedicated team focusing on Redhat on Power as well as a nicely staffed Oracle team. And as I am realizing now Oracle themselves aren't too bad so far in terms of support on power systems.... so I don't think we're really in the dark....

What type of systems are you running if you don't mind me asking?

 

[DBAwhosaysNIE]

we're >95% SuSE of which about 2/3 is on xeon and about 1/3 is Opteron. actually my support comment (re: lack thereof) was directed at Oracle. we had IBM servers for a few years (still have ~75) and I have nothing but good things to say about their support. we used to have websphere and that was a different story but I think that was a case of a "not quite ready for primetime" product trying to catch the end of the bubble. I still have a very favorable overall impression of IBM.

 

[stevenriz]

I agree... well we have considerably less servers then you. We have about 20 total, 7 of which are IBM. anyway what do you think about the opteron? are you actually running oracle on those systems?

 

[DBAwhosaysNIE]

yes, our Oracle boxes are ~50/50 Opteron/Xeon.

love them! (Opteron) if you can architect for horizontal scaling (replication, layer 7 switching, etc.) I think dual Opteron boxes are definitely the best value right now. I'm not anti-Intel (they've been good to us over the yrs too), just pro bang/$ and I think AMD holds that title for now.

just my 2c...

check back in a year and I will probably have changed my mind. ;-)

 

[stevenriz]

well that sounds pretty good actually about the AMDs. They were in the running if we were going to stick with Sun. Our app servers are now running on dual xeons which are, knock on wood, excellent. I'm not even sure if IBM has Opterons. I don't recall seeing them in the product list. Glad you like them. We'll consider in the future.

 

[DBAwhosaysNIE]

they do (IBM Opteron) or at least did...

we have eight of them, x325 - not sure what current model #s would be.

we're buying mostly HP now (DL145, 385, etc.) though Sun is finally starting to get their prices in line.

 

[stevenriz]

Those are nice, and inexpensive too!! We looked the the Sun but for the database I was dying to get a sparcV but was way out of our budget... we're on a dual sparcIII machine now and it's ok, our export is only 4gb so the db isn't that big.

Do those HPs have any redundancy features? power supplies? NICs? mirroring?