We are looking at a new environment to run our Oracle Database running on SUSE (potentially migrating to RedHat). Our database is approximately 100GB and performs adequately on our current hardware (x86_64) with approximately 6GB of ram allocated to it. We are growing quickly however and will require more performance shortly.
Given the cost of Oracle licenses we would like to maximize the value from each license by choosing the most appropriate CPU to run the software on.
The questions are:
Are there substantial benefits to
looking at Itanium or Sparc hardware, are there
any drawbacks? Is there a point where
one starts to scale out better?What are the long term support options
for Itanium? Given the dominance of
x86 would it be safer long term to
stick with x86?On average what would be the
performance benefit of implementing an
Oracle database on Itanium or Sparc over
x86_64? Is this an issue at all or
will other factors (IO/RAM) cap out
first?
If anyone can point me towards some solid documentation on comparisons between the platforms that provides good case analysis of when to choose which I'm more than happy to accept that as an answer.
Edit:-
Added Sparc as an Option as it was previously not considered however with the recent Oracle Sun aquisition seems very relevant.
Best Answer
This isn’t the solid documentation you asked for, but it may aid in the decision-making process:
Vendors (both hardware and software) are phasing out support for Itanium across the board — you’re likely to struggle to be able to buy Itanium kit from anybody except HP fairly soon. That said, RedHat doesn’t have a habit of dropping support for a platform unilaterally without a lot of notice.
The big issue for me would be future migrations — if Itanium continues on the current trend, you may run into problems replacing or upgrading your server(s) a couple of years down the line (unless Intel starts supporting the IA64 instruction set on x86_64 processors in the meantime).
Whether Itanium as an architecture is an improvement upon x86_64 is going to be largely down to the nature of your workload, but for many database applications you’ll hit I/O bottlenecks and RAM starvation before the differences in architecture become particularly apparent (I don’t know if this would hold true in your case, obviously). As x86_64 is being developed pretty aggressively, the difference is going to be rapidly approaching zero depending on application.