—Horizontal Scalability with Oracle® 10g and Egenera BladeFrame Lowers Costs, Improves Flexibility for Siebel Customers—
Marlboro, Mass.—February 22, 2005—Egenera Inc, a leader in utility computing, today announced that Siebel Systems Inc. has validated a scale-out strategy for the database component of its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Running Oracle® 10g Real Application Clusters (RAC) on the Egenera® BladeFrame® system with Red Hat Linux Advanced Server, Siebel has achieved 80 percent scalability up to four database nodes for Siebel 7.7. Based on these results, Siebel has confirmed that the Oracle-on-Egenera solution offers customers a lower-cost yet equally reliable alternative to the traditional scale-up database model associated with proprietary UNIX systems.
Two Siebel CRM modules—Siebel CallCenter and Siebel eChannel—were used for testing, producing a heavier workload than most customers experience. The reference architecture was specified to provide a level of scalability and availability consistent with the needs of typical Siebel users, helping to ensure that results would be relevant.
Platform criteria also included:
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Minimal IT support
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Easy to deploy/provision/reconfigure
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Flexibility to allow new servers to be added to any tier
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Small footprint
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Centralized administration
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Ability to run multiple tests against different databases in parallel
Tested by Oracle for RAC, the Egenera BladeFrame system was chosen to provide processing capacity. According to the Siebel team, the BladeFrame neatly organized the 24 servers needed for testing, significantly reducing cabling complexity and datacenter space requirements. By consolidating servers in a single chassis with an integrated cluster interconnect, the Egenera system's Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture simplified the test configuration substantially. Moreover, with no local disk, Egenera blade servers have no permanent identity, enabling the team to reassign them in minutes to varying tasks as test conditions were altered. NetApp® unified storage systems were selected to deliver a level of flexibility, reliability and availability consistent with the BladeFrame.
Results indicate that the scale-out strategy is a viable solution for the database tier of Siebel CRM solutions. Scaling from a single database node to a two-node configuration resulted in 80 percent scalability with minimal change in average response time per transaction. The four-node configuration delivered the same 80 percent scalability versus the single-node configuration. Based on these results, Siebel has affirmed that Oracle 10g RAC running on Linux®-based Egenera blade servers offers its customers a value-driven alternative to the traditional scale-up database strategy.
"Working with Siebel, Oracle, SRS2 (an Oracle Certified Partner and Egenera professional services alliance specialized in grid-application tuning) and Network Appliance, Egenera is pleased to bring the benefits of utility computing to customers running Siebel solutions," said Susan Davis, vice president of product marketing and management, Egenera. "By leveraging the BladeFrame's clustering and redeployment capabilities, users can lower capital and operational costs—while maintaining mission-critical reliability—for crucial database applications such as CRM."
"Siebel worked closely with Oracle, SRS2 and Egenera in grid-application tuning to deliver these results. Our testing derived substantial benefits from the Oracle and Egenera architectures," stated Francisco Casas, group manager architecture, Siebel Systems. "The BladeFrame made it simple to deploy, scale and manage servers, directly influencing a lower total cost of ownership. This powerful solution should be of benefit to many Siebel customers."
"Oracle is very pleased with the results of Siebel's testing," said Richard Sarwal, vice president, server applied technology, Oracle Corp. "Our Oracle 10g clustered database solution enables Siebel customers to scale out Linux-based database servers for lower total cost of ownership. Oracle RAC, combined with the utility computing capabilities of the Egenera BladeFrame and NetApp unified storage, gives datacenters the best of both worlds: cost-efficient hardware and enterprise resource management that help yield a better return on investment."
A white paper describing the Siebel testing in detail is available at: http://www.egenera.com/whitepap.php.
Press Contacts
Gillian Farquhar
Greenough Communications
617-275-6514
gillian@greenoughcom.com
Egenera is a global leader in delivering computing solutions that simplify datacenter operations and infrastructure. The Egenera BladeFrame product family simplifies the datacenter with an innovative server architecture specifically designed to reduce complexity and enable IT to respond rapidly to business requirements. Market-leading enterprises around the world trust the Egenera BladeFrame system to run their most important business applications, and achieve higher resource utilization, faster application time-to-market, and lower total cost of ownership. Headquartered in Marlboro, Mass., Egenera has offices worldwide. More information is available at www.egenera.com.
Egenera, Egenera stylized logos and BladeFrame are registered trademarks of Egenera, Inc., in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. NetApp is a registered trademark of Network Appliance, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. All other product names, service marks and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.
