Data General first to complete Clustered Oracle Terabyte Test-to-Scale

Business Wire, Oct 9, 1996

WESTBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 9, 1996--Continuing to demonstrate leadership in clustering technology, Data General Corp. today announced that it is the first vendor to complete Oracle Warehouse Terabyte Test-to-Scale program using a clustered configuration.

The "stress test" was conducted on two 8-processor AViiON servers running Oracle Parallel Server software in a cluster supporting a 2.5-terabyte Oracle7 database stored on CLARiiON disk array subsystems. The results demonstrate the power of clustered AViiON systems and Oracle Parallel Server technology not only to support multi-terabyte data warehouses, but also to provide excellent performance scaling in a high availability configuration.

The Oracle Warehouse Terabyte Test-to-Scale program recognizes a select group of vendors that are capable of supporting a database containing one terabyte of raw data, representing large data warehousing applications. The test simulates a realistic sales analysis scenario, emphasizing some of the most taxing and time consuming features required to implement a data warehouse, and performs a complex sales analysis: data loading, index creation, creation of summary data and complex query processing.

For the test, Data General used two 8-processor AViiON AV 5800 SMP servers running DG/UX Clusters software. These two servers were clustered with 35 CLARiiON disk array storage subsystems, supporting 2.5 terabytes of data. Each AV 5800 was configured with eight 133 MHz Pentium processors and one GB of memory. Each CLARiiON storage subsystem contained 19 4.2-GB drives in RAID 5 configuration, one hot-spare drive and two storage processors with 64 MB of write cache. One of the CLARiiON systems, used primarily for the DG/UX operating system and the Oracle software, was configured with four mirrored pairs, two RAID 5 stripes and two hot-spare drives.

During the test, the unique and powerful online storage management features of DG/UX allowed easy manipulation of the database layout on raw virtual disks, without having to export and re-import the Oracle data.

"We have worked hard with Data General on several joint development projects to optimize Oracle Parallel Server performance of DG/UX," said Dr. Thomas Hildebrand, vice president of Intel/MIPS products division at Oracle Corp. "The results of this stress test show that this work has paid off and that our customers will be able to reap the business benefits."

"Data General was the first vendor to publicly demonstrate a four-node Oracle Parallel Server cluster and now we are the first to complete Oracle's Test-to-Scale Program in a clustered configuration," said Sue Sweeney, vice president of strategic alliances at Data General. "The results confirm that clustered AViiON servers can give our mutual data warehouse customers enhanced application performance through the addition of systems, as well as the highest level of application availability and ease of multi-system management."

DG/UX Clusters

DG/UX Clusters provide a scalable, high availability platform for mission-critical applications. The PC-based DG/UX Cluster Manager software offers an easy to use graphical interface which allows the administrator to manage an AViiON cluster as a single system. Both users and system managers can realize the benefits of continuous computing on a high-volume commodity platform.

DG/UX Clusters also enables software upgrades and selected hardware maintenance without downtime. DG/UX Clusters can be interconnected across multiple sites using replication server software, providing global availability of applications and data throughout the enterprise.

A study on high availability solutions conducted by D.H. Brown Associates states, "Data General's DG/UX Clusters provides and anomaly, offering first tier functionality in a brand new product." The study goes on to say, "DG tops the category as the only vendor extending concurrent access to clustered file systems as well as databases."

Data General and Oracle Business Alliance Leads to Superior Results

Since 1983, Data General and Oracle have worked to continually enhance a broad base of complementary products and services for users and applications resellers. Most recently, Data General and Oracle teamed to deliver the Enterprise Solutions Program (ESP), a joint strategic initiative focused on taking risk and complexity out of implementing mission-critical open systems solutions. Through ESP, Data General and Oracle have collaborated on a number of joint engineering projects, including tuning of the Oracle database and Oracle Parallel Server for maximum performance on AViiON SMP servers and CLARiiON disk arrays. Currently, the two companies are working on a number of efforts to optimize the Oracle database for Data General's future ccNUMA systems. These efforts include large memory support for Intel Pentium Pro processor-based systems.

About Data General

Data General (NYSE:DGN) is an open systems company that specializes in providing servers, storage systems and services to information technology users worldwide. The company, with headquarters in Westboro, Mass., reported revenues of $1.2 billion in fiscal 1995. Additional information on the company, its products and services is available on the Internet at http:/www.dg.com. -0-