A New Dawn

Anyone looking for trends in the server hardware and operating system market need look no further than research house IDC's recently published figures for third-quarter server shipments and revenue.

Although all-round shipment growth of 19.5% and better-than-expected revenue growth of 1.9% to $10.8bn stole the headlines, hidden within a huge amount of numbers were figures indicating a clear trend in the market towards small, entry-level servers and the Linux operating system.

While revenue from high-end servers (costing $500,000 and above) shrunk 14% compared to the same quarter last year, revenue from midrange servers ($25,000 to $499,000) was up 7% and revenue from volume servers (less than $25,000) was up 9%.

IDC's figures indicate that x86 servers based on processors from Intel and AMD "drove much of the quarterly revenue growth year over year." x86 server revenue grew 8.3%, while unit shipments grew 21.4%.

"Strong growth for Windows and especially Linux-based solutions, modular scale-out server deployments of rack-optimised servers and blades, as well as a very good replacement cycle environment for servers purchased before the IT spending recession are all contributing to exceptional market demand," says Mark Melenovsky, program director in IDC's server research group.

Meanwhile, Linux continues to rapidly outpace both its rival operating systems and the market as a whole. According to IDC, $743m worth of Linux servers were sold in the quarter, with factory revenue up 49.8% and shipments up 51.4% year on year.

This was hardly an unexpected trend, as the increasing performance of smaller, low-cost machines has risen to the point where they are able to compete with larger servers for general computing requirements. But just how far into the enterprise infrastructure will low-cost servers extend?

The commodity file-, print-, web- and mail-server market has already largely migrated to volume servers running Windows and Linux, and any company still using RISC-based servers for these environments is either trapped in a long-term lease agreement or has money to burn.

The price/performance ratio of x86 servers means that it is no longer cost effective to run RISC Unix servers at this level, and there are indications that the price performance benefits of volume servers also extends to the database layer of the enterprise architecture.

Certainly Oracle, the market leader in database management systems for non-mainframe systems, believes that the price/performance benefits of volume servers now make them suitable for mission-critical application deployment.

The company affirmed its commitment to Linux in April with a program to encourage ISVs to port their applications to Linux, stating that the company ran its own accounting, payroll, HR and marketing applications on volume Linux clusters.

Explaining its rationale, Oracle detailed figures from internal tests running its own E-Business Suite applications serving 150 users. According to the company's figures, a 2.4GHz dual-Intel processor server with 6GB of memory delivers an average response time of 1.3 seconds and a 90% response time of 2.2 seconds, for $8,860.

Meanwhile, a 750MHz dual-RISC processor server with 8GB of memory delivered an average response time of 1.7 seconds and a 90% response time of 3.8 seconds, for a cost of $53,330. Given those figures it is not hard to understand why volume servers are increasingly being deployed at the application layer. But can the same level of price performance be delivered at the database, which requires more processing power, more volume servers, and more complex clustering?

According to Tim Payne, EMEA senior product director at Oracle, the answer is yes. "Over the last year we've come on leaps and bounds," he says. "There's a lot of things driving it including the maturity of Linux, deployments moving to mission-critical applications and the emergence of very reliable low-cost computing components, whether it's hardware, storage or connectivity."

Payne says that recent preliminary analyst figures from IDC show that the market for relational database management systems on Linux doubled in 2003, reaching $420m, compared to $225m in 2002 and $100m in 2001. That may be a small percentage of the market (2.8% of the $7.9bn total in 2002), but is expected to grow to 25% of the market in 2007 with a 65% CAGR.

While Payne admits that Oracle sees customers deploying its database technology on clusters of Microsoft Windows as well as Linux, he maintains that Linux is the better platform for database serving, and not just because of Oracle's rivalry with Microsoft.

"If you're running the operating system as a database server, what do you actually need the operating system for?" he asks. "Linux is a lean, mean operating system." The argument goes that running a database on the smaller Linux operating system cuts down on performance overheads.

This is no doubt helped by the fact that Oracle is now using Linux as its product development platform, so any new features, such as clustering support, are better exploited by Linux. Additionally, Microsoft's Windows has its own cluster service technologies, which inevitably complicates the deployment of Oracle's Cluster File System (CFS).

Oracle is not the only database vendor developing clustering technologies for its products, to be exploited by Linux. IBM is doing the same with its DB2 Integrated Cluster Environment (ICE), an integrated and pre-configured cluster environment based on DB2 and IBM's WebSphere application server, along with Tivoli systems management software and Red Hat or SuSE's enterprise Linux.

The company has also recently launched a joint integration centre with SuSE at its laboratory in Toronto, Canada. The collaboration will initially focus on the integration of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server with IBM DB2 Universal Database and then be extended to other IBM software products.

SuSE is an important partner for IBM given its commitment to the company's multiple server platforms. This helps to explain the development agreement, but also IBM's willingness to invest $50m in network software vendor Novell to help it acquire SuSE for $210m.

The acquisition will give Novell the opportunity to put much of its operating system expertise and technologies into Linux. While the company is not planning any merger of Linux with its own NetWare network operating system, it does see opportunities for integrating some functionality from NetWare to Linux.

"The whole suite of applications that Novell brings to the table is very complementary to what we have," says SuSE's CTO, Juergen Geck. "When it comes to management, what the industry hasn't really figured out yet is how to make co-operation in systems management a reality. What customers are interested in is the ease of use of individual machines. If you can get that right customers will listen to you."

Investment in new cluster management technologies and the increasing functionality of Linux are key to the open source operating system displacing more established technologies such as Unix, according to analysts. This will continue with developments from Linux vendors and database vendors alike, although there will inevitably be a delay before these new developments make it into enterprise infrastructures.

CBR Opinion

Database clustering is nothing new, but the involvement of Linux and low-cost volume hardware bring a new price/ performance paradigm that database and server vendors alike are eager to exploit. However, while there are good indications that Linux and x86 servers represent the future for database servers, there is still some way to go before both Linux and database clustering and cluster management technologies hit the mainstream.