Bob, can you give us a big-picture view of how this compares with LVM? tnx,
Ben On Thu, 6 Nov 2003 11:00:01 -0800 Bob Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | Last night I went to SVLUG[1]'s meeting in San Jose with a friend. | The featured speaker was Wim Coeckaerts from Oracle. He discussed the | Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS). | | OCFS is a filesystem for Linux that works on shared disks. It works | over Fiberchannel, shared SCSI, or FireWire. FireWire is just a hack | (but a _cool_ hack!). Fiberchannel and SCSI are the technologies that | Oracle supports. | | I didn't find OCFS itself very interesting. It's not a general | purpose filesystem, it's just the minimum needed to support Oracle on | shared disks on Linux. They're working on version 2.0, which will be | more generally useful. I was more interested in what Wim told us | about Oracle's Linux commitment and advocacy. | | Oracle has recently shifted its base development platform from Solaris | to Linux. That means the core developers are developing Oracle on | Linux, and a porting group makes it work on Solaris. It also means | that 9,000 developers at Oracle now have Linux boxes on their desktops | and in their labs. | | Oracle recently pressured a SCSI card manufacturer (maybe Emulex?) to | open source their drivers. They said, in effect, "Oracle has to be | able to support Linux for our customers. We can't do that with binary | drivers. Until you have open source drivers, you're not on our | recommended hardware list." The manufacturer has now released its | drivers under GPL. | | I wish somebody would do that to Nvidia. | | Oracle's long term goal is to have all software that they depend on | available as open source, so their customers aren't dependent on any | closed software other than Oracle. They will write whatever parts | aren't available elsewhere. OCFS is the first step. They are also | looking at a couple of other categories. I think he mentioned cluster | management software and cluster volume managers, not sure what else. | | So Oracle "gets it" in a big way, but they haven't been as vocal about | their Linux commitment as IBM. It will be very interesting to see how | this plays out. | | Oracle's open source web site is http://oss.oracle.com/ . | | SVLUG met in a large hall on Cisco's campus. There was seating for | about 250-300 people, but less than half the chairs were full. They | had a big screen projector and a sound reinforcement system. Very | different from EUGLUG's meeting space at 43 W. Broadway. (-: | | PenLUG[2] is meeting next Thursday night on Oracle's campus; maybe I | can go to their meeting too. (-: | | [1] Silicon Valley Linux Users' Group. http://www.svlug.org/ | [2] Peninsula Linux Users' Group. http://www.penlug.org/ | | -- | Bob Miller K<bob> | kbobsoft software consulting | http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] | _______________________________________________ | EuG-LUG mailing list | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug -- _______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
