New IT Strategies Rock at Oracle - Page 3

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Upgrading 10,000 CPUs in 24 hours

Virtualization has also made upgrading Oracle's systems faster. The company recently upgraded 10,000 CPUs within a 24-hour window over a weekend, Sunday told his audience.

His goal "is to have a physical environment which I run largely as a pool or cluster of virtual machines," Sunday said. Oracle's grid spans multiple physical datacenters, and supports all its applications, internal, for Oracle University or the vendor's on demand offerings, Sunday said.

Oracle has its own virtual machine, Oracle VM, announced by company president Charles Phillips at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco in November. This is based on the Xen open source hypervisor.

The virtual machines run on Linux, which has also benefited Oracle greatly. About 90 percent of Oracle's environment runs on Linux. The remaining roughly 10 percent "are not Linux, and they account for 90 percent of our support and maintenance costs" Sunday said.

In addition to being "the largest enterprise user of Linux in the world" according to Sunday, Oracle offers Oracle Unbreakable Linux, based on Red Hat Linux and downloadable from Oracle's Web site for free.