SAN FRANCISCO — Dell Monday showed off its premiere relationship with Oracle
by offering new services between the two companies.
Dell said Oracle on his company’s computers is becoming the standard in the data center more than it ever has in the past, such as its Oracle 9i RAC running Red Hat Linux based on Dell systems.
“Despite what I look like today, we are on more solid footing than ever,” Michael Dell said sporting a broken foot suffered from a horse riding incident.
The Round Rock, Texas-based computer maker has been slowly but surely growing its relationship spanning back to last year’s “Unbreakable Linux” launch. Dell is one of several top-tier vendors that making announcements at the Fall OracleWorld here. Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems
are also expected to make major announcements this week. Oracle itself announced “Oracle 10g,” which include two major upgrades to its databases and applications server as well as new enterprise management software to back up their push for more automated systems.
Unlike the competition, however, Dell said his company has seen 46 percent growth in revenue based on Oracle-related contracts with a spike of 50 thousand customers in the past two years.
“We had 71 percent growth in China, which is a key market for us,” he said. “Our business overall has done quite well. Unit volumes are up 27 percent and this is the 11th quarter in a row our business grew more than 20 percent.”
As testament to its relationship with Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle Dell said it would begin offering a new single source Oracle solution available through Dell.
“Opposed to traditional models where you go through different vendors to get different needs met, here you have one throat to choke,” Dell said.
Dell also noted that the IT trend has been to switch from 8-way and above systems to more scalable clustering technologies, such as the one his company offers with Oracle.
“The thing about dinosaurs is that they can eat up big slabs of meat every day,” Dell said as an obvious dig at IBM’s mainframe business and other proprietary vendors. “There is nothing wrong with proprietary, it it’s just expensive.”
Dell said in about 10 years, grid computing would become more mainstream for medium sized businesses in a broad sense and said his company would be at the forefront of the build up.
“Last year we had 1GHz machines. Now we have 2GHz machines and it can only improve as the processing power improves,” he said.
A prime example of current grid use is Stanford University’s Bio-X program, which uses than 300 Dell PowerEdge servers in a high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) to simulate effects of medicines in studying Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.
Also helping power future grids, Dell said it will offer Intel’s latest 1GHz and 1.4GHz Itanium 2 processors in its dual-processor PowerEdge 3250 server, which it sells for HPC clusters. Dell said the new configurations will be available worldwide later this quarter.
