INDUSTRY

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- At Oracle Open World today Intel led a broad team of InfiniBand technology developers demonstrating deployment benefits of InfiniBand architecture running on Oracle9i Real Application Clusters and two of SAS Institute's enterprise-class solutions: SAS Enterprise Miner and WebHound. Besides Oracle and SAS, this proof-of-concept demonstration included well-known enterprise vendors Dell and EMC in addition to such new enterprise entrants as InfiniSwitch, Voltaire and OmegaBand. The demonstration connected InfiniBand- and non-InfiniBand-enabled servers running -- for the first time -- Oracle9i Real Application Clusters and two enterprise-class solutions from SAS, Enterprise Miner for data mining and WebHound for clickstream analysis. At the core of the technology demonstration were pre-production Intel InfiniBand components. "Our goal with this demo was to illustrate how seamlessly InfiniBand can fit into today's data center that supports a broad range of technologies, including Ethernet, Fibre Channel on Intel architecture and newly deployed Intel Itanium(TM) servers," said Tom Macdonald, general manager of Intel's Advanced Components Division. "An InfiniBand-enabled Intel architecture-based platform enhances scalability and performance of Oracle9i Real Application Clusters with virtually no changes to existing applications." Oracle Vice President Doug Kennedy said, "Oracle9i Real Application Clusters has changed IT economics by enabling customers to build on cost-effective Intel clusters for achieving the highest levels of scalability and availability. Together with Intel's InfiniBand technology, Real Application Clusters offers enhanced performance and provides a compelling solution to our customers." Added James Rothie, CTO of EMC, "InfiniBand Architecture is poised to deliver unique benefits to data center storage. In addition to seamless integration with existing EMC storage solutions, this demonstration of our first native InfiniBand prototype storage solution highlights our commitment to delivering storage solution flexibility." The Demonstration InfiniBand architecture's high-bandwidth, low-latency functionality provides the ideal infrastructure to take advantage of the Oracle Cache Fusion Architecture that supports a scale-out cluster model. In the demonstration, Oracle9i Real Application Clusters ran in a distributed manner on four rack-mounted, eight-way Intel(R) Pentium(R) III Xeon(TM), 900Mhz processor-based Dell PowerEdge 8450 servers. By reducing the latency it takes to perform a message transfer, InfiniBand architecture ensures that Oracle9i Real Application Clusters runs faster, thereby freeing CPU cycles for additional work by the application. Additional information is available at www.intel.com