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Oracle Joins IBM AIX Collaboration Center
pgsqlDao writes "CRN is reporting that Oracle is joining IBM's AIX Collaboration Center. 'IBM announced the center Dec. 16 as a $200 million investment where it will centralize AIX development, customer relations and advanced features for independent software vendors. While the figure represents existing salaries and equipment drawn together under one roof, it also represents some shift in emphasis by IBM from Linux back to its mature Unix operating system.' In November Oracle announced that it has chosen Solaris 10 as it's preferred development and deployment platform for X64 computing."
That's sort of true.
I worked not too long ago for a company with an 8xCPU, 12TB Oracle instance running on RedHat Linux 3.0 (32bit). It worked perfectly well, but we were bottlenecked on CPU and memory (needed to move to 64bit) and wanted to hook a SAN up to it (before that we ran it over NFS, which works believe it or not). We tried to find a combination of 64-bit Linux, Oracle and Veritas (to manage volumes on the SAN) to run on the high-end Linux hardware available but there just wasn't enough out there at that point.
We ended up moving the DB to AIX, at the strong urging of IBM, on whose server the bottlenecked Oracle instance had been running. They were far more motivated to sell us a RISC box than they were to try and find a Linux solution (the profit margin was substantially higher) and we knew that, but we couldn't find the combination we needed to move forward with Linux. IBM went to a lot of trouble to show us benchmarks that showed AIX was superior to Linux, which says a lot about their Linux strategy, namely it's all well and good until it steals market share from their high-margin products.
It's possible IBM shifted policy after they got burned on 64bit Itaniums. At that same job I was on, they had put one in, wanting to increase Oracle's addressable memory space, but the performance of the CPUs was so abysmal they ended up moving backwards to P4s and 32bit, which as I mentioned did the job until the application finally bottlenecked. At the time we purchased the AIX box from them, they didn't have any x86 boxes in their pipeline that would run 64bit Linux (they had a new xseries that would scale past eight of those 32bit CPUs with 64bit extensions I believe, but it wouldn't run 64bit Linux), so it's possible they've clipped the higher-end x86 boxes from their offerings altogether in order to keep AIX viable in this enterprise market.
What IBM does or does not do should always be taken with a grain of salt.