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
