Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) launched Release 2 of its Database 11g flagship product. It is the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based vendor’s most significant upgrade in two years.
More than 1,500 developers contributed to Release 2 in an attempt to satisfy channel partner demands on reliability, security and scalable databases.
According to Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Oracle Server Technologies, reduced storage costs because of the new partitioning feature, active data guard and the RAC One Node are three things channel partners will be interested in Oracle Database 11G Release 2.The strategy is to incorporate cost saving features in a lower cost package, Mendelsohn added.
Lowering customer cost is an overriding theme to the new release. Over the past decade a pattern has emerged from Oracle database customers. Between 15 to 20 per cent acquire Release 1 and the rest obtain the Release 2 candidate.
“It is this reason that 11GR2 is for the masses,” Mendelsohn said. “With this pattern we try to innovative on Release 1 and in Release 2 we polish it up and add new cost saving features.”
Oracle also realized that with the poor economy and pressure on CIOs to make budgets cuts the team had to deliver quality of service applications with security and at a low cost.
“There are two things for database users. The first is to deliver better information to compete and the other is the global recession and the IT budgets are either under pressure, flat or declining. So one of the big themes is how to use Database 11GR2 to lower the cost and to get great info,” Mendelsohn said.
Paul Vallée, executive chairman and founder of the Pythian Group, an Ottawa, Ont.-based database administration outsourcing provider, said that with every major release of Oracle, the second is the most important one. “It doesn’t matter how far back you go. This is where the software comes into its own,” Vallee said.
The new features are “all at the heart of what customers need,” said Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus. “A great many Oracle customers have already migrated to 11g or are on 10g and making heavy use of RAC. Every single one of them … will undoubtedly be avidly adopted by core enterprise customers for the most demanding apps. … I wouldn’t say any of these are bells and whistles.”
The RAC One Node or (Real Application Clusters) is aimed at the consolidation efforts of customers. RAC gives users the ability to leverages low cost servers, scale infrastructure, and its fault tolerant.
“Lots of customers are interested in consolidation of smaller databases on one server and in a lot of cases they do not need the scalability just availability. RAC One Node get most of the availability from deploying apps on one server at a lower cost so it is an option for availability to customer who need just that and not the scalability,” Mendelsohn said.
The new partitioning technology enables users and channel partners to implement different tiers of storage. The strategy will incorporate storage vendors with high and low end storage units. “As it turns out most active databases like the ones that take orders and are actively updated need high-end storage, while the rest is archival where you just need low cost storage,” Mendelsohn said.
The Oracle executive figures that 11GR2 will save customers about 10 to 12 times on storage. Release 2 also has an automatic storage management feature with a cluster filing system.
With files from Chris Kanaracus
