Oracle: Pump up the volume
Oracle (orcl), far from shy when it comes to pumping out press releases, is expected to field more than 30 of them between Monday and Wednesday, in conjunction with its San Francisco trade show. And Oracle isn't even talking up the applications side of its business this week. Instead, all of the news will focus on the next releases of its database, application server middleware and tools.
Oracle is expected to tout new scalability and clustering claims for its recently christened 9i database which is due to ship in the first half of 2001. It also will trumpet caching advances it has made with its forthcoming Oracle 9i Application Server, the product known until late last week as Oracle iAS Release 2.0.
Oracle released version 1.0 of iAS in June of this year. The company said the new 9i Application Server version will ship before the end of this month. Pricing for the new version will remain the same as for release 1.0, they added.
Oracle's unveilings come on the heels of a slew of recent scalability announcements by hardware and software vendors, including Microsoft (msft), Sun (sunw) and Hewlett-Packard (hwp). Last week, Microsoft rolled out its high-end Windows 2000 offering, called Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, as well as a host of supporting server applications. Sun highlighted its "Net Effect" workstations and servers based on its new UltraSPARC processors and set the stage for a December announcement on improvements it is making to Solaris on the clustering front.
Oracle, like these other vendors, is pitching its new high-end offerings to its existing customers, but especially to dotcoms looking to up the computing capacity of their back-end Web-serving infrastructure.
"The goal is to do with one server what you now use 100 servers to do," said Oracle Director of Internet Platform Marketing Scott Clawson, in describing the advances Oracle has made with 9i Application Server. "We're talking about turbo-charging by 250 times the throughput (of Oracle's application server) because of the ability to cache both static and dynamic content."
Clawson said that, using Oracle's improved 9i Application Server Cache technology, Oracle has benchmarked proof of the new levels of scalability. Using iAS 1.0, Oracle achieved application-serving performance of 30 requests per second per server for its own OracleStore application, but with 9i Application Server, Oracle clocked 7,500 requests per second per server for the same application, he said.
Oracle has made other tweaks to 9i Application Server as well, including enhancements to its Oracle Portal Framework (which is built into the application server) and console-management capabilities.
Oracle OpenWorld is being held at the Moscone Convention Center. CEO Larry Ellison will address customer and partner attendees on Tuesday, as will Intel Corp. CEO Craig Barrett. Sun CEO Scott McNealy will speak to attendees on Thursday.