Oracle World: Oracle's Linux grid

Larry Ellison began his talk last week at Oracle World with this slide:

Oracle Grid Computing Strategy

Low Cost
    > Standard Intel and AMD hardware

High Performance
    > 64 PC server grid is faster than fastest mainframe
    > Capacity on demand - add servers as needed

Reliability
    > Fault tolerant architecture
    > No single point of failure

What was abundantly clear from the main news about Oracle supporting and re-distributing Red Hat Linux is that Oracle is aiming for more Linux deployments, and ultimately more Oracle deployments in the enterprise.

But the underlying news is how grid-based architectures based on industry standard hardware will drive storage performance needs. More grid deployments lead to a much higher number of concurrent clients accessing a single data set. This drives a requirement to deliver simultaneous I/O streams with the high throughput and low latency demanded by grid applications and databases.

To date, storage systems capable of matching grid performance have been few and far between. Complementing existing storage systems with centralized storage caching will take grid computing further.