Value of Itanium or Sparc over x86_64 for Oracle Deployment
- by Antitribu
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.
