INDUSTRY

REDWOOD SHORES, CA -- Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL), today announced that Syngenta, one of the world's leading agribusinesses, has chosen Oracle9i Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Compaq AlphaServers to handle the large amount of data that its genomics and biotechnology research plans to generate in the coming years. Syngenta's data needs are expected to nearly double in the next few months and Oracle's database clustering technology will allow Syngenta to cost-effectively deploy a highly scalable solution to meet these needs, also providing all the benefits of standards-based, high-end computing capabilities. "Syngenta's bioinformatics databases are growing at a rapid rate, related to the enormous amount of world-wide scientific activity in this area. In the last 12 months the database storage requirements at our Jealott's Hill International Research Center have doubled, and future predictions show the database storage requirement growing exponentially," said Dr. Simon Bright, head of European Genomics, Syngenta. "What we needed was an affordable database system that had the scalability to cope with an extraordinary abundance of data, whose exact amount could go beyond anyone's estimation. Oracle9i Real Application Clusters, coupled with Compaq's server expertise, gives us a cost-effective way to expand our database and deal with the huge data requirements for storing and analysing our biotechnology data." Syngenta had several criteria for the new IT infrastructure. Syngenta needed to achieve greater IT cost efficiencies and invest in a new system that could accommodate the exponential growth rate in the amount of data being stored. At the same time, Syngenta's new biofinformatics IT infrastructure had to be able to cope with complex computations that the researchers would run during genome sequencing analysis. "After examining several competitive solutions, we found that the Oracle and Compaq combination best met our needs," commented Derek Scuffell, database administrator for Syngenta. "We believe that Oracle9i Real Application Clusters and Compaq's AlphaServers running Tru64 Unix constitute a powerful combination, which will provide us with the competitive advantage of a truly scalable IT platform with high-speed computing power. But above all, the Oracle and Compaq combined solution struck us as the one providing best price/performance in relation to its scalability, and offering the best analysis tools for our research." John McLevy, Oracle EMEA vice president of technology solutions commented, "Syngenta's current database is around 150Gb in size, and is expected to grow to 250Gb within the next few months alone. In addition, the amount of data generated by the data analysis progresses exponentially. With such a scenario in mind, our customer's priority was to adopt a standard platform running on commodity hardware that could deliver the highest levels of scalability at the right price performance ratio. And all of this while helping ensure outstanding response and data load times. We are delighted to have been selected and to be contributing to the exciting advancements this company is making in the global biotech and agribusiness arena." The exceptional amount of data involved in genomics and biotechnology research is expected to intensify the demand for high-end, scalable database and data analysis solutions over the next few years. The first organism that was sequenced (the bacteriophage phiX174) has 'only' 5,000 base pairs of DNA. The human genome has 3000 million base pairs and the rice genome, which has recently been sequenced by Syngenta's Torrey Mesa Research Institute, contains 450 million base pairs of DNA and approximately 32,000 to 50,000 genes. "The unpredictable nature of agribusiness means that such companies need to have a platform that can grow quickly without disrupting research," said Paulo Ramos, vice president, business critical solutions group, Compaq Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). "Oracle9i Database with Compaq's broad spectrum of industry-leading platforms delivers to our customers, a scalable, manageable, always on database environment that is easy to buy, install, maintain and grow with one single point of system."