Oracle Grid Computing - the Solution to Islands Of Computing

Supercomputing Online has someone at Oracle World Latin America in Brazil and reports on this session by Oracle Senior Vice President of Server Technologies Andy Mendelsohn: "Mr. Mendelsohn used Mercado Libre -- the largest online auction site in Latin America -- as an example of a customer who is moving to Oracle Enterprise Grid Computing. Mercado Libre saved US $500,000 in hardware costs using Oracle Real Application Clusters, Intel and Linux to consolidate and standardize their infrastructure. As a result, they have the ability to add capacity on demand to keep up with their rapid growth.

'When you build a building, you want each floor to be the same and not dramatically different,' explained Mr. Mendelsohn. 'The same is true when you are creating the data center of the future. You want to use standard components and at the lowest cost.' "

Who would disagree? Anyone getting a price quote from Oracle on the cost of implementation and support of such a solution might wonder about all that talk of lowest cost though, since with some fairly standard options the bill for software to Oracle alone would come in at $80,000/CPU or more, with another $16k+/year/CPU into perpetuity.

What's more, the only real-world, in production Grid systems I have yet to read about are built on open-source tools. Oracle has no first tier customers they hold up as success stories (the ones that do invariably use it in some sort of development environment, not production.)