Oracle/Linux/System z: a powerful combination for efficient IT

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Is your organisation looking to reduce the costs associated with Oracle workloads? In the drive for increased IT efficiency, many organisations would love to achieve that goal -- but few have considered the option of migrating these workloads to an IBM System z mainframe running the Linux open source operating system.

That's a pity, because the barriers to entry of a mainframe/Linux/Oracle solution are lower than ever, according to Martin Boakes, IBM System z specialist at Logicalis. "The mainframe's reputation as a costly and cumbersome technology is completely outdated," he says. "Today, a wide range of organisations are finding that the new breed of mainframe beats distributed systems hands-down when it comes to efficiency, cost and environmental credentials."

In fact, he adds, Logicalis is offering UK organisations the chance to ‘test-drive' this kind of environment for free in its Bracknell data centre. The test environment, Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture on System z Linux, uses Oracle 10g Real Application Cluster technology to enable companies to consolidate Oracle servers on a single, powerful system.

The use of advanced z/VM features, meanwhile, means that additional cluster nodes can be rapidly deployed as needed, without any disruption to normal database operations, resulting in dynamic load balancing across all nodes.

That's already proving of great interest to the many organisations who, over the years, have found themselves running vast estates of Oracle databases running on disparate servers, says Rob Bailey, business intelligence specialist at Logicalis. "A few of these estates run into the tens of thousands of databases, and plenty run into the hundreds. Either way, those in charge of keeping them up and running are painfully aware of the massive management overheads and wasted hardware capacity involved. Moreover, having consolidated many Oracle databases on System z Linux (and, by the way, maybe also ported other databases such as SQL Server, Sybase and Teradata to Oracle on this platform), customers can now afford to implement Oracle MAA high availability features such as Real Application Clusters and Data Guard which could not be justified for each individual, small database," he says.

"The good news is that they quickly find that the Oracle skills they already have in-house are easily transferable to a mainframe Linux environment," he adds.

By providing a free test environment for Oracle on System z, Logicalis gives customers the opportunity to explore the hardware consolidation potential of this powerful combination, either by using the test environment to run their own workloads or simply to witness first-hand how well the mainframe, Linux and Oracle technologies interoperate to provide an efficient IT platform.

This value proposition isn't solely targeted at the largest companies, Boakes insists. In fact, the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with mainframes has never been lower, with entry-level machines costing as little as £60,000. And System z has a vital role to play in virtualisation projects, he adds, because it allows hundreds of servers to be consolidated onto a single machine, compared to a ratio of around 5:1 in VMWare deployments for x86 architectures.