Oracle's GPL Linux Firewire Clustering

Smoking writes "It seems that Oracle just released libraries to allow low cost Linux clustering solutions using firewire... Aside from the coolness factor (imagine a beowulf cluster of DV cameras...) it's quite new for Oracle to release GPL software. They also seem to include really useful tools for NIC failover, Wizard building framework and integration of the cluster into Gnome (via a gnomevfs plugin)."

Thanks Oracle!

I was wondering how I was going to cluster a group of PostgreSQL servers!

Thanks!

Cheap!

The Firewire cards needed to build a cluster can cost as little as 10% as much as the required FiberChannel hardware

Not to mention the FiberChannel switch. The Brocade [brocade.com] fiber switch we use to tie our three SGI Origins to our SAN's storage RAID was over CA$12K when we bought it.

Re:Cheap!

Yes, but for some applications dropping $12k into the budget is not possible, and yet something similar at a lower cost would be ideal. Heck, this is cheaper than shared SCSI using brand name equipment. Not a bad compromise between speed and cost.

--
Evan

Re:Cheap!

Not to mention the fact that FireWire is mostly self-configuring. I've not seen a self-configuring Fibre Channel anything.

My office-mate just spent a week attempting to configure a Brocade-switched Fibre Channel setup for HACMP. In his defense, it was his first attempt at such.

Everything I've ever heard about Fibre Channel reminds me of something Rube Goldberg threw together.

This comment officially sanctioned...

Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of DV Cameras..

• in a Girl's College Changing Room.
• taping Natalie Portman?

Oh yea

Now imagine a CLIC cluster of these....

Haha get it?! Because people are always like "imagine a Beowulf cluster..." so I said imagine a CLIC cluster! Haha! Genius!

I had hoped the firewire was for net

I hoped that they were making strong firewire net connections and ways of channeling the systems together into some sort of hypercube formation.
That would make it appear as a true parallel processing system and giving some API to take advantage of it. I guess something like that is still possible and with firewire being fast and cheap, it is something that may be worth looking in to.

-Tim

Firewire's future

This is great news for anyone that is a firewire afficionado. Because millions of people will be doing firewire clustering? No. But it does show the versatility of the standard. Its a shame that Intel has such a hard on to kill it, because firewire really is a great technology.

As firewire begins to scale to higher speeds this looks like an even better method to connect not only things like computers and their peripherals - but things like your television to your PVR to your camera to your computer.

Re:Firewire's future

Firewire will never die. The reason is simple, the next generation of midi is based around firewire as the physical transport. The origional midi has lasted decades because it was well designed and met most of the needs of those using it, but more modern setups that need to send actual sound data, not just notes were poorly supported with the old standard. Now there is a midi standard that can do everything the old one can and also carry samples!

Firewire isn't just for DV!

I dont know why every time Firewire is brought up, someone mentions it in relation to DV.. DV is one of the simpler uses for Firewire, the real treasure is in its ability to link ALMOST ANYTHING!

This really is very cool stuff, and although I'm as suprised as everyone else about Oracle releasing open-source software (GPL nonetheless), it's another huge step forward.

Things like this piss off Microsoft to the Nth degree. That rocks!

Survival Tactics

Actually, this is of no surprise to many that have followed Oracle over the past few years (perhaps 5+).

Oracle has been incoporating many open standards into their products recently which has been necessary to help keep the company in a (relatively) good position in the database server market. In the past all of their technologies were proprietary with their custom SQL extensions and their custom language for stored procedures and triggers (PL/SQL). Oh, and Linux - forget about it.

However much of that has changed and now they support Linux, XML, Java (I believe the first to have Java stored procedures), and a large portion of the J2EE platform with things like OC4J (their java app server based on Orion).

See these links for just a sampling of what I'm talking about.

Java Stuff [oracle.com]
Linux Stuff [oracle.com]

Re:Survival Tactics

Well, I wouldn't call their position in the database market "relatively" good. They're #1, and have been for a loooong time.

The Java stuff is cute, but by and large hasn't been implemented much. People buy Oracle because it's been around forever, and has been tested probably more than any other software on the planet. PL/SQL is still, by far and away, much more popular than their Java app. PL/SQL is incredibly optimized and solid, whereas their Java solutions are still getting there.

Their XML parser is definitely good, but the documentation for it is virtually nonexistent.

I don't think that they're necessarily adapting because they have to. Their core business is very strong. I think that they're just trying to expand their market. Of course, they've had lots of misses too. Some of their apps, like Oracle Forms (which is incredible) and their very nice web server while used, aern't nearly as popular as their core RDBMS.

And you forgot one of their coolest new technologies... OODBMS. Very bizarre. Very different. Hasn't taken off yet, but I've used it, and it's very very innovative.

Oracle's not in any trouble *yet*. But I think that they're hurt every time they try to work their way into the low end market to compete against things like MySQL. Bad idea.

Re:Survival Tactics

Um, OODBMS is not [exln.com] really [versant.com]
that [neologic.com] innovative [adb.com], although I will agree that it is cool. I prefer PostgreSQL [postgresql.org] myself, but that's because I don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on all the commercial databases. *shrugs*

I apologise in advance if Oracle has redefined OODBMS to mean something different than I'm used to it meaning, but at least as much as I know what it is, it's hardly innovative. It's been around a very long time.

Great, now I have to...

buy a whole new round of motherboards that are firewire enabled! I wonder if you can create ring configs if you have two roots per PC.

I wonder when Oracle is going to buy a company that produces firewire interface controllers... can you say instant SAN business?!?!

Just kidding, I think...

Hey you !

Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of DV Cameras

That's not fair ! You just removed an opportunity for a +5 Funny comment !
(kidding. I know it would have been -1 Boring)

Red Hat to use Oracle's cluster software

There is more Oracle news announced. This [infoworld.com] was just posted over at InfoWorld. Me thinks its as much a blocking move towards .NET, see below.

From article.

: Linux backers are working to strengthen the OS and bring it closer to competing with the proprietary versions of Unix that currently dominate the data center. Adding a clustered file system into Red Hat Linux is another step toward this larger goal.

hmm, not much there

After going through the crappy registration process, what do I find: not much at all.

The (code not available) firewire stuff is a fix to allow sharing of firewrire disks. Which has been in the kernel for quite some time (perhaps they submitted it), but it is hardly radical (couple of lines of code, if your hardware happens to support it).

Seems more like a PR announcement to me.

Shared Disk

Does anyone know how firewire makes it any easier to share a hard disk between systems, for clustering support? According to the Oracle description of the patch "Firewire allows developers to easily and cheaply build a clustered system on a shared disk, which is useful for testing clustered applications...".

In a normal cluster configuration, SCSI provides an interface for allowing a hard disk to be shared between actual servers, so that if one goes down another can take ownership of the SCSI disk. Fibre is a common carrier, linking the computer systems to a disk array system (SCSI over Fiber), and Firewire could be used to replace it, but is the only benefit its expense?

Proper way to connect these

A cool project like this ought to be interconnected with a Hubzilla [charismac.com].

Firewire is not an alien technology

Really people it's just a high speed interface. Not really that much different that an old serial port, just faster. Do you ohh and ahh over the fact you can hook up "almost anything" to a serial port? Of course not. Firewire is no more, or less, versitle than USB, older serial, or even parallel ports.

Now is firewire had a liquid metal port that accepted any type of interface by morphing the connection, then firewire would be fucktacular! (Copyright 2003).

P.S. Starting throwing Copyright notifications on your posts, the "media" is starting to post OUR comments in their papers without our consent!

Firewire technology is important.

My friend, I am unsure if you are purposely being obtuse, or just don't know about firewire technology.

Firewire is hot-swappable. Try that with a external SCSI Drive. (not a hot swappable disk, the entire drive)

Firewire doesn't need a computer to work. USB 2.0 and 1.1 need a computer for it to work, but you can actually plug a DV camcorder straight into a digital VCR.

There is up to 50MB/s transfer rates (400Mbits/s) and the design is scalable, meaning the next iteration of Firewire will be 800Mbits/s, or possibly even 1.2Gbits/s

Ease of use: FireWire cables are a snap to
connectyou dont need device IDs, jumpers, DIP switches, screws, latches or
terminators.

Data and power: the FireWire cable carries data of course, but also power. I have one cable on my desktop for my iPod. It charges and synchs it to my iTunes with one wire. Serial doesn't do that.

USB 2.0 doesn't have real world speeds at the advertised 480MBs. Firewire does.

It is an industry standard. Bar none. Purchase a new digital 8 or mini DV camcorder. What do you get? A firewire port right on the side.

So basically, I wish all ports were designed with the expandibility of firewire in mind. I can do just about anything with it. Now even if I have a super-duper fast parallel port, there is tons of stuff I wouldn't want to do it with.

BUS Limitations

I have a limitation on my Motherboard of 266 MBps due to the link from the north to south bridge.

Could you connect a firewire card on AGP so that you can make use of the full 400 MBps that Firewire provides?

IP over FireWire

Anyone heard of it?
-Max

.. they're also in cahoots with mysql

I was over at mysql.com earlier and I noticed a large pop-up ad for Oracle 9i and I thought, hmm.. something fishy here, since when do companies advertise products for their competitors? I mean that would be like slashdot running microsoft ads.

oh wait..

LINUX BOX as Firewire HD

How about some code that lets linux act as a firewire Harddisk for other systems. I think they use the SBP-Protokoll. That would make SAN affordable.
Have an old PII and a couple of IDE-RAID-Cards to build a TB Firewire HD.

Ahh but

But does firewire support multipath io with load balancing? A single point of failure in the hardware is unnaceptable. On a more serious note this is great as it allows for developers to test on cheap gear. That san with fiber channel we just bought for our clusters was one expensive dog.

Oracle is being a GOOD Open Source Participant

It's nice to see Oracle contributing patches, reference implementations, and useful sample code back to the open source community.

Oracle has jumped 100% on the Linux bandwagon and is pushing it as the OS of choice for RAC (real application clusters) and claimed to switch all their internal production servers to Linux in the near future.

To see them giving code and "lessons learned" information back to the open source community is awesome. This is the type of business and open source relationship that proiveds a win, win for both the commercial party and the open source parties involved. Oracle benefits from a free and stable platform while contributing back to that community code that can help make the product (Linux is this case) better for everyone else.

Thanks Oracle, nice to see you doing a good thing for open source.

MS Campaign backfired

I guess this is some strong evidence that all the anti-GPL stuff that MS put out has backfired.

Firewire for real clusters? I don't think so.

When I first read the post, I got pretty excited. Dreams of cheap clustering for scientific applications danced in my head. No more need for Myrinet [myricom.com], no Dolphin [dolphinics.com], just Firewire and Beowulf!

Then, I read some performance metrics on Firewire. High bandwidth. High latency [evaluation...eering.com]. Doh! The fairies stopped dancing for joy.

The problem is that in scientific computing, the time it takes for one node to say I need that data to another node, and actually get that data determines the performance of many more apps than does the speed of the CPUs.

So, until a cheap, low latency solution for communications comes by, real clusters will be communicating over Dolphin [dolphinics.com], Myrinet [myricom.com], or some other propietary technology [sgi.com].

Tony

Walmart read this

2 Microtel Lindows Boxen 400$

2 Firewire Controllers 100$

1 120GB Firewire Drive 280$

Cables and hubs 200$

Kick Ass Lindows Cluster 980$ PRICELESS

Clueless Ellison

In reply to this Slashdot story larry ellison was quoted to say, "We did what? GPL? Open sorce? And what the hell is Firewire?" -Geek

GPL Nice... Registration bad.

A thing to note about this nice software from Oracle... from what I found, you have to REGISTER on their website just to get access to it... Registration requires everything... phone, company info, home address, company address, you name it. Kinda intrusive for a GPL thing, no?

Re:GPL Nice... Registration bad.

> Kinda intrusive for a GPL thing, no?

Then why don't you mirror it so the rest of us can download (and subsequently mirror) it without having to register ? The GPL guarantees you that right. =)

Offtopic Question

Yes, those things are cool.

I'm not DB expert, so I'm curious:

What about this 10.7 desupport [com.com] problem?

Is Oracle being reasonable about the cost of supporting old software, or are they doing an MS-style push of their customers into an upgrade many feel they don't need?

As long as I can use one of these in my cluster...

Has to be one of the coolest computer peripherals in a while: http://www.charismac.com/Products/firedino/index.h tml Firewire hub/dinosaur!

The cost of Oracle.... ummmm nothing really!

I have read several articles here why people prefer to use because Oracle is so expensive.

Unless you are planning to use it in a commercial setting, Oracle is free as in beer!

The latest version of Oracle for Linux can be downloaded from here [oracle.com]

No TCP/IP support

With all the shared filesystem, process management, localization features, they don't support the most basic of all: TCP/IP over firewire. Then again, we wouldn't be in a recession if managers were producing something useful.

Obligitory comic book store guy comment

Geekiest noun ever.

great!

now if only some enterprising storage device manufacturer would make an actual firewire drive, instead of the typical bastardized IDE-with-a-Firewire-bridge crap they've been selling. . .

Re:Why

I could ask the same about copper Fibre Channel cables.

My suspicion is that, in both cases, the answer is: they're not in as much demand as, say, Cat 5 Ethernet cables.

Re:Imagine...

But they already had in the description...............

Redundancy is good in networks, and bad in Slashdot posts :P

Re:Oracle on Apple XServe?

There is an OS X port of oracle. I'm pretty sure it's a final production version.. but I could be wrong on the status.