Re: Enterprise 8i on Linux or Solaris?

On Wed, 25 Oct 2000 12:53:56 GMT, Cliff Palmer <cliff_at_palmercs.com> wrote:

>Daryl, let me add my voice to those recommending Sun. I dont work for sun
>(My personal preference is a Compaq Alphaserver, but Sun is a mature,
>stable, supported platform with a long history of running Oracle well).
>Linux will be there (and soon it appears) but I would be cautious about
>trusting my business to it only because the examples of scaling I've seen
>with Linux seem to always involve some extra something (code patch, unique
>network topology, etc).

Thank you for this statement. You point to one of the most important problems deriving not from Linux, but on the PC architecture if we're talking about Linux on PCs. The term "PC" in this context includes all Intel-x86-based systems and compatibles (some years ago, this was well-known as IBM-compatible, he he :-) ) - machines consisting of standard components are limited in their maximum amount of memory, you don't have much space for additional peripheral adapters and so on. And when it comes to using some Intel-based server machines like IBM's Netfinity series or Compaq servers, the prices differ significantly from standard PCs. When it comes to multiple CPUs, the battle goes on.

In the end, you may find it cheaper to go with a different architecture from the very beginning :-)

Apart from this, Linux offers also great stability and reliability.

>You should consider your workload requirements. If you need to support 20
>users with stable applications with moderate throughput requirements using a
>few GB of data then Oracle on Linux may be a great and cost-effective
>solution. If you need to support a higher demand environment then you shoud
>definately consider Sun (or Dec Alpha :).

Another architecture collegues of mine have made excellent experiences with is IBM's AIX on RS/6000 machines, especially with Oracle database.

I'm currently building a test scenario with Oracle 8.1.6 EE on SuSE Linux 6.4, and so far it looks quite good. But this is an ordinary desktop PC, a Pentium-III 600 with IDE disks and I won't trust it when a production environment depends on it :-)

Regards,

        Martin Received on Thu Oct 26 2000 - 09:18:37 CDT