Aussie cultural shift to Linux in top gear
Aussie cultural shift to Linux in top gear
Oracle has come out fighting against suggestions that enterprises are not prepared to make a cultural shift towards Linux operating systems in Australia by claiming that the trend of change is already in full swing.
Senior Oracle representatives at the Oracle Open World conference, held in Melbourne this week, feel confident that the take-up of Linux is going to increase rapidly based on 90 percent of new Oracle applications customers in Australia choosing Linux over the last 12 months.
Roland Slee, the director of business and technology solutions for Oracle ANZ, said that the adoption Linux operating systems and the use of grid computing has paved the way for companies to work in a more scalable and flexible environment that can embrace open source technology in the future.
“We have already experienced a huge interest in companies choosing Linux over Unix, and now we are experiencing the benefits of customers moving towards grid computing too. It’s widely acknowledged in the 40 year history of information technology there have been four major generations of computing architecture. Mainframe to the mid-range, mid-range to client server and client server to the Internet.
“Each change brought better benefits to users. Throughout all those generations though, only one computer could be used to manage a database, until 2001. This is when we introduced database technology that could manage a single database spread over multiple computers, instead of one, meaning new applications could be integrated far more easily. Grid computing is another milestone in IT history, which allows many computers to behave as if they were one, like a big mainframe, with better features.
“This is what the Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters does. When we released it in 2001, it became possible for the first time to manage a single database using multiple computers delivering high performance, high integrity, transparency and it also marked the beginning of the end of the server race as we knew it.”
He argues that Oracle has been able to become the computing platform in software that manages information, which is scalable, more reliable, more secure and more manageable than an individual server is.
“This of course has profound implications. For one you do not need a very sophisticated proprietary operating system anymore in order to able to deliver very sophisticated computing applications. And so Linux goes from being an operating system that is good for use on the edge of the network to becoming an ideal operating system for use at the centre of your glass-house.”
The NSW Office of State Revenue (OSR) recently became one of the first organisations in Australia to apply the Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell PowerEdge servers to provide high availability and reliability for core taxation system.
The solution supports the OSR’s annual transactions, worth over $13 billion. It needed an architecture that would provide 24/7 availability for its ecommerce services and remote service delivery capabilities for its geographically scattered offices throughout NSW.
Mike Kennedy, CIO for the OSR said. “Having already used Oracle on Linux technology for over four years, we were confident that Oracle Real Application Clusters on Red Hat Enterprise Linux would deliver the 24/7 availability for our critical systems. As we expand our electronic service delivery offerings, system availability has become an increasingly important issue.
“Part of our ongoing strategy is consolidation and part of that is standardisation. We have 12 to 15 servers supporting our mission critical databases and we wanted to consolidate all these onto one platform. The easier a systems environment is to manage, the quicker it is to implement necessary change. We have seen up to 84 percent performance improvements in our batch and online processing since implementation.”
Kennedy also agrees with Oracle that Linux is no longer on the edge anymore but is instead very effective as a core part of enterprises businesses.
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