By Jon Bernstein, 15 August 2002 12:45
NEWS Oracle chief Larry Ellison has tied his colours firmly to the Linux mast describing it as "cheaper, faster and more reliable than any other environment around". Addressing an audience at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, Ellison used his keynote to ram home the message that Linux is heading for big business. He said: "For a long period of time Linux has been the province of computer hackers, computer scientists and universities. Now I'm afraid to say you're going to have a lot of people in here with suits on. I apologise for that but it's going to happen." Oracle has invested heavily in Linux over the past few years. In June, Oracle boosted its Linux support with a new version of its 9i database software that can run on a 'cluster' of Linux servers. Clustering allows businesses to harness multiple servers to run a very large database, so servers can share work or take over from each other if one fails. "We're actually using Linux to run our own business," Ellison continued. "And we're encouraging our customers to use Linux because it's cheaper and faster... and more reliable than any other environment around." "What most people won't agree on is that Linux can deliver enterprise level performance for enterprise level applications. It couldn't run a 50,000 or a 100,000 user email system, couldn't run a million user website and so on. We don't think that's true any more." Between them Oracle and IBM recorded just $2m in Linux database sales last year. However, analyst firm Gartner Dataquest says the market is to grow to $200m by 2006. Additional reporting by Wylie Wong, News.com
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