Beta Customers Tap Into Oracle Grid Computing

ORACLEWORLD, SAN FRANCISCO, Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ:ORCL) customers today revealed how they are using the grid computing and manageability features of Oracle Database 10g to effectively handle ever-growing data levels while lowering costs. CERN became an early adopter of Oracle Grid Computing. For example, Oracle Database 10g beta customer BioMed Central is breaking new ground in the area of cost-effective scientific research publishing; CERN can now process formerly impossible amounts of data; and Ordnance Survey is embracing a new way to capture, process and manage its Internet-delivered map data. More than 100 customers from around the globe worked with Oracle to test and provide strategic direction for Oracle Database 10g, including Amazon, Colgate Palmolive Company, Deutsche Post IT Solutions GmbH, Digex, Nemmco, New Mexico Department of Transportation, Qualcomm, PCI Geomatics, Proligence, Inc., Schlumberger Information Solutions, Tecsis, Telstra, University of Arkansas, and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. BioMed Central Improves Service While Lowering Costs BioMed Central is a leading bio-medical research publisher that allows free access to the bioinformatics, genomics and proteomics research it publishes. These peer-reviewed research articles, which are published by scientists in BioMed Central's journals, are rich in graphics, video content and text. BioMed Central is using Oracle Database 10g to make it easier for scientists to manage the publishing process. BioMed Central is also using Oracle Database 10g to offer its customers -- 300-plus institutions, such as Harvard University, National Institutes of Health (NIH), World Health Organization (WHO), Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Columbia University and the University of California -- low publication costs combined with open access to the research once it has been published. The end result is a hundred-fold reduction in 'cost-per-article-access' compared to conventional publishing. "At BioMed Central we are using Oracle Database 10g manageability features, together with its XML and rich media capabilities, to deliver web tools that allow scientists to perform tasks such as manuscript submission, document tracking, peer review and editorial decision making," said Matthew Cockerill Ph.D., technical director, BioMed Central Limited. "The goal of Open Access publishing is to make scientific research articles and data available on demand. Grid technology, like Oracle Database 10g, will play a critical role in the future of science, giving scientists the tools they need to analyze and manipulate this information." CERN Adopts Grid Computing The world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is being created at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, called CERN. The accelerator will be used to answer some of the most fundamental questions of science and as a result, LHC computing requirements are enormous. This unprecedented project has staggering data storage requirements with projections of more than 10 petabytes of data being generated annually. To meet these incredible data processing requirements, CERN became an early adopter of Oracle Grid Computing. "With Oracle Database 10g's focus on grid computing, we hope to ease deployment, management and clustering of data for our world-wide computing grid project," said Jamie Shiers, database group lead, IT division, CERN. "Oracle Database 10g now supports ultra-large databases that meet our requirements for scalability and Oracle's grid vision will help us solve the computing challenges we will face in the future." Ordnance Survey Uses Spatial to Map to the Internet Britain's Ordnance Survey manages one of the world's largest, most sophisticated civilian mapping operations. They provide their customers easy access to the most up-to-date, intelligent, and accurate geographic and topographic information covering Great Britain. Ordnance Survey has more than 430 million topographic features stored in a single seamless database. "Ordnance Survey manages nearly a terabyte of data in Oracle Spatial. We've found no other database that can meet our requirements for easy and open access," said Ed Parsons, chief technology officer, Ordnance Survey. "It is dramatically easier for us to maintain our data using Oracle 10g, as a result, we are able to provide our customers with high quality data and mapping on demand."