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ORACLE 10g STUNS IN BETA TEST

NSE.IT, the first beta-test users of Oracle 10g in India, have embarked on an extensive testing phase running since the last four months, which has delivered extremely promising results.

Speaking to CXOtoday, G.M. Shenoy, senior vice president of NSE.IT Limited, said, "We have successfully migrated Oracle 9i based applications to 10g, on a 'beta-test sized' database with 80GB of information stored in it. The project is currently in the user acceptance testing mode, and we are excited about evaluating 10g's Grid computing capabilities."

Grid computing technology works by harnessing, as needed, the power of the total computing capacity present in a cluster of computers, so that any available server can rapidly process and solve problems. It creates an illusion to the user that all servers on the network are one large computer, available to all users and applications.

Detailing the company's Grid computing initiative, Shenoy explained, "In a stock exchange, risk management systems are generally busy during the day time, whereas systems running settlement activities remain comparatively unoccupied. We plan to harness 10g's Grid functionality by coupling both systems together, which will allow us to efficiently manage the 'less busy' time period."

Enterprise Grid computing can dramatically reduce the time, labour and cost of IT management by pooling industry-standard commodity servers, storage and software. As a result, companies can use the power of their entire system, or computing Grid, for several projects, rather than continuing to purchase more capacity for separate projects.

To assist in the migration phase, HP is supporting NSE.IT on the hardware front and Oracle is imparting the necessary training programs to the company's administrators.

The migration phase from Oracle 9i to 10g was 'extremely smooth,' according to Shenoy, and there were no hiccups as far as recompiling programs was concerned. "In comparison, migrating from Oracle 7.3 to 8.1 took a greater effort in terms of manpower and time."

Currently, the Oracle 10g database is running on a single instance environment at the company, and the Real Application Cluster (RAC) test phase will commence in a week's time.

Shenoy concluded, "10g, with its automated storage management capability, has a vast improvement in database manageability features, and will helps us save time and resources in the long run."

Existing customers of Oracle who are under the annual support contract for earlier versions of Oracle software, will be entitled to a free upgrade to Oracle 10g. The price of Oracle 10g products will remain the same as the Oracle 9i suite of products.

Oracle India has chalked out an aggressive marketing strategy for the new product. "With the introduction of Oracle 10g, smaller organizations can also adopt the new technology at a very low entry cost," said Somesh Bhagat, marketing director of Oracle India.