Oracle fires up server appliances with Sun's Solaris

By John Cox
Network World Fusion, 12/14/98

Oracle and Sun today announced a licensing agreement to create what Oracle CEO Larry Ellison calls database server appliances.

The agreement is designed to greatly simplify buying and installing Oracle databases.

"The buyer will only see the Oracle database," Ellison said. "They won't have to see, buy, load or maintain an operating system."

Oracle will buy Sun servers with either Sun's SPARC chips or Intel's Pentium chips and load them with a slimmed-down version of Sun's Solaris operating system and the Oracle8i database. Oracle says the software will be loaded, configured and tuned before the computers ship. Customers only have to plug the server appliances into a wall outlet and then hook them onto their network to have a ready-to-use Oracle database.

Sun, in turn, is licensing the Oracle database as the underlying data store for Solaris and for its current and upcoming middleware and e-commerce software. Sun will tightly integrate its software with Oracle's so that the database is, in effect, invisible to users.

Oracle is doing this by using only part of Solaris, what experts call the "kernel," instead of the entire operating system, and by sealing it off from application developers.

Ellison said about half of all current Oracle databases now in use run as the single application on a given server. The new appliance can replace these over time, as well as become the database underlying a fast-growing array of Internet-based electronic commerce applications.

The server appliances are in development now, and scheduled to ship in March 1999 on Solaris 32-bit and 64-bit SPARC multiprocessor servers. Oracle will sell the server appliances and is negotiating with other vendors, including PC server vendors, so they can sell them under their own brand.

Customers buying Oracle8i will not be charged extra for the Solaris kernel.

Oracle also plans to offer specialized versions of the server appliance, adding e-mail server software or its new Internet File System (IFS) to the database. Using Oracle and IFS, customers can store all types of data, including graphics, HTML pages and text, inside the Oracle database and then keep track of it via IFS, which, in effect, replaces the file system in Unix or Windows NT.

Ellison predicted that large-scale Web e-commerce applications would adopt a network-computing model - with Web browsers accessing server-based data and applications. In this model, he said, customers will find it makes economic and administrative sense to have fewer but larger servers instead of numerous smaller servers.