Sun to herald virtualization plan at Oracle show

The strategy to be described at the OpenWorld conference enables multiple OSes and apps to run on same computer. Sun President/CEO Jonathan Schwartz will focus on Sun's virtualization strategy during a keynote presentation at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Schwartz will emphasize software to run multiple operating systems on the same computer and increase the percentage of compute cycles in use. Specifically, details will be shared on products in Sun's xVM (x Virtual Machine) line, including the xVM Server hypervisor and xVM Ops Center, providing management software, Steve Wilson, vice president of xVM at Sun, said. A hypervisor provides a virtualization layer for running more than one operating system and applications simultaneously, Wilson said.

With its hypervisor, Sun looks to aid users who might have a datacenter full of small servers, each running a separate application and perhaps in use only at a certain time of the day or month, said Wilson. The average utilization of these machines is very low with customers only using 10 percent of available compute cycles.

"The idea is that the xVM Server software, which is the hypervisor software, will allow customers to take various workloads, including applications written to Solaris and Linux and Windows, and run them simultaneously on the same hardware," Wilson said.

Featured in xVM Server is work from the Xen open-source community. Through xVM Server, Sun will extend Solaris technologies, such as Predictive Self-Healing and ZFS (Zettabyte File Server) to Windows and Linux.

Sun previously has offered its Logical Domains (LDOMs) hypervisor, but it only supported SPARC CPUs. The new hypervisor extends to x86/64 systems.

Ops Center enables management of multiple operating systems and the attendant hardware, including systems from Sun, IBM, HP, and Dell.

Sun also plans to announce support of its strategy by vendors, such as Microsoft, MySQL, AMD, and Quest Software. "We have an agreement with Microsoft where they are going to be supporting Windows running inside our hypervisor," Wilson said.

A preview version of xVM Server will be available from the new OpenxVM.org community this week; general release is planned for next spring. The Ops Center product is due for a general release in December.

Also, Schwartz plans to tout the company's efforts in "eco-computing," involving microprocessors, servers, and storage, during his keynote.

Author: Paul Krill @ InfoWorld

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Cisco protocol to boost Oracle

Cisco has launched a protocol it has jointly developed with Oracle that it claimed would help users running databases over larger server clusters.

The two vendors developed the RDS (Reliable Datagram Sockets) protocol and will make it part of an industry-developed open-source software distribution called Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution, said Pramod Srivatsa, a product line manager for Cisco server fabric switches. It is intended for Cisco switches using Infiniband high-speed data-centre technology.

Growing data centres and demands for processing have driven the development of new forms of connectivity, such as Infiniband and 10-Gigabit Ethernet, between servers in data centres. But pure networking speed - up to 20Gbit/s in the case of Infiniband - isn't all that's needed to make data centres run faster.

Enterprises that want to set up a very large deployment of the Oracle 11g database software once had to do it on a single large server, Srivatsa said. Oracle already offers RAC (Real Application Clusters) 11g software for distributing that deployment over multiple, smaller Intel-based servers running Linux. But that only works up to a cluster of about four servers, and RDS makes it more scalable, he said. RDS has been tested successfully with as many as 16 servers and is designed to work for clusters of as many as 64 using Infiniband, according to Srivatsa.

Infiniband is well-suited to Oracle database software because it has to quickly exchange many messages of varying sizes, Srivatsa said. Mellanox, which supplies some of Cisco's chips for Infiniband switches, helped develop RDS. In the future, customers will probably be able to use RDS with 10-Gigabit Ethernet too, Srivatsa said.

RDS was designed for clusters of servers in one data centre, which could include blade as well as rack servers, he said. Customers of both Oracle and Cisco can request the software from the companies now and start testing it. Cisco will start providing RDS for commercial use in its Infiniband servers after it is certified by Oracle, probably next month, Srivatsa said.

Author: Stephen Lawson @ Techworld.com

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ADWEA selects Oracle to automate billing and customer service

Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority has implemented Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing, which is expected to enhance customer service, streamline business processes and accelerate revenue collection.

Oracle provides a modernized user interface that helps the Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority (ADWEA) call center representatives to process customer requests. The bilingual Arabic-English capabilities inherent in the Oracle application provide the ADWEA with flexibility that simplifies hiring and training new staff.

With Oracle, the ADWEA provides its customers with accurate utility bills based on systematic meter-reads that include supplementary consumer information concerning rates and other services. The ADWEA has also improved its business processes to accelerate bill printing and distribution and shorten its payment collection cycles.

Saeed Nassouri, project manager at the ADWEA, said: "Oracle offers us the flexibility to access a single customer view and use that information to accelerate our service delivery and billing processes. Even more importantly, Oracle provides a scalable foundation for us to fully automate our metering and billing operations."

Source: Datamonitor

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