IBMs Database VP: Our Grid Scales Better - ' Linux Integration ' (
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Oracles big on bringing grid to SMBs (small and midsized businesses), though, whereas IBM is closely associated with academic grid deployments—i.e., not always commercial.
Our technology for grid for medium and smaller clients is broader than just the database. You can provision application servers, you can provision application and orchestrating technology to manage your own environment, all orchestrated through one console to bring capacity up and down on command.
Oracle has a nice focus because they have nice capabilities. Theyre trying to make a noise about that one capability.
On to other Toronto lab goings-on. IBM recently announced, with SuSE Linux AG, the new Software Integration Center up at the Toronto lab. A priority was to situate DB2 comfortably on top of SuSEs Linux Enterprise Server platform. Hows that going?
Weve had very, very good setup experiences with Red Hat and SuSE on the tight Linux integration work weve done. With DB2 8.2, which was code-named Stinger, we delivered a lot of the direct I/O, synchronous I/O, that sort of stuff that came along with the better scalability of the Linux 2.6 kernel.
We see that paying off with the Linux customers we have as well.
In terms of the enterprise scalability of Stinger and Information Integrator 8.2, which is on the same base, with the advanced I/O features in 2.6, were seeing more enterprise-class workloads being done on DB2/Linux.
Is that resulting in more IBM/Linux customers?
Weve [acquired] 500 new Linux customers since the beginning of 2004. For new servers, we see a faster adoption rate for Linux than for Windows. We see Linux growing very rapidly. As most analyst presentations would show, the Linux servers will outship the Windows server shipments [in coming years].
Both IBM and Oracle have intense Linux focus now. Whats distinguishing the two?
The big wave here is all about information management. When I look at the market to see whats differentiating DB2, its our breadth of experience. Most others are delivering point database solutions. While we still think we have the best relational database in the market, we have a broad range of other capabilities necessary to solve information management problems.
What problems, exactly?
Volume, velocity and variety. We know the volumes are huge. Enterprise databases over the past five years are 100 times larger than five years ago.
And a great deal of variety. Used to be, structured data was the name of the game. Now, its important to get your hands on unstructured.
Today, companies might be spending up to 40 percent of their annual IT budgets on integration.
So, youre saying that content management is where the big bucks are?
IBM had strong growth for our third quarter. Database revenue grew 11 percent. Distributed enterprise content management revenues grew 56 percent.
Eighty-five percent of the worlds information is in unstructured formats. People are really struggling to get their arms around all that information.
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