Re: native Oracle-port on Linux -- what would it take?

e_l_green_at_hotmail.com (Eric Lee Green) writes:
>Well, the latest SMP servers from Compaq and DEC look pretty
>good. RAID-5 SCSI, hot-swappable drives, multiply-redundant
>hot-swappable power supplies, what more could you want?

Okay, since you asked - how about these:

Hot swappable CPUs, hot swappable memory modules, hot swappable mainboards, individual temperature control per CPU, individual CPU reboot without service disruption, the ability to "farm" processors and run multiple releases of the operating system on the same iron (one OS per "farm") and to dynamically reassign processors from one "farm" to another without service disruption, a crossbar-switched backplane instead of a bus system, two pathes to every piece of hardware and an operating system that knows how to reroute data pathes within the machine, fibre channel arbitrated loop (FC-AL, 1 Gigabit/sec and up to 10 km distance between disk array and machine) to connect to the disk arrays (using RAID 1+0 instead of RAID 5 for speed), up to 14, 28 or even 64 processors per machine (64 bit, 250 MHz, 4 MB cache per processor for example) and up to 14, 28 or even 64 GB main memory per machine. Then two machines of these with a working clustering/failover-solution.

I admit that you can get pretty decent boxes when looking for PC servers (We are using IBM 704's as standard servers and are quite satisfied), but the above features are usually missing in PC hardware - even server hardware.

That's what you get when you buy Enterprise Ultra hardware from Sun. This is at least one league above PC hardware (yes, in features and in price as well).

You don't install such boxes routinely, but for a data warehouse solution or other mission-critical parts of your enterprise this is just right and it scales like nothing (from single processor solutions with memory in the 32 MB range up to 64 processor solutions with GBs of mem and TBs of disk space).

>The only thing
>that will down it is if the motherboard or CPU burns up (no recent OS,
>alas, is as reliable as the old Honeywell Multics, where a single
>processor going out just meant disabling that processor and not even
>having processes burp).

Suns Enterprise Ultra Series and Solaris do that, too.

Kristian

-- 
          Kristian Koehntopp, http://www.koehntopp.de
"3*666 = 1998"	-- Bruder 13 auf der Verschwoerungsmailingliste