Apr 8th 2000: NetLedger's data center is the largest deployment of Oracle database servers on Linux servers in the world, it emerged last week.

The experience of online small business accounts provider NetLedger in setting up the 500-machine server farm suggests that Linux running on PCs may have advantages in the ASP environment over more mainstream solutions. High-end systems manufacturers such as HP, IBM and Sun all argue that providers must use their enterprise-class server platforms to achieve the highest levels of performance and availability. But NetLedger's findings do not bear this out.

Although NetLedger, which is personally funded by Oracle boss Larry Ellison, knew what database platform it was going to use, it had no bias in favour of Linux to start off with. "We didn't have a preconceived notion about what operating system to use," said Dave Durkee, CIO of NetLedger, in an interview with internet.com's LinuxPlanet (for the full interview, see Linux Meets Oracle: NetLedger's Real-World Solution).

Scalability was the main factor in the choice of Linux, because of its ability to run on PCs rather than larger Unix boxes. "You just can't scale those machine as well as PCs - you can add a jillion small machines if you want at a lower cost and scale that way," said Durkee. For fast-growing ASPs, the ability to rapidly add capacity is of overriding importance.

But despite the choice of PCs as the hardware platform, Windows was ruled out early on as the operating system because of the overhead involved in its graphical interface, which is an irrelevance in an ASP data centre. "Managing the servers can be done by telnetting in, so there is a lot of waste associated with NT," explained Durkee.

Sun platforms were ruled out on simple performance grounds. "Quite honestly, Oracle didn't run as well on Solaris [Sun's Unix operating system] as on Linux," Durkee said. When Netledger moved on to test different hardware platforms with Linux, it found that a 500 MHz Pentium III Intel box outperformed a Sun Netra T1 equipped with an UltraSPARC 440 processor.

Another factor in favour of Linux was the ability to tweak the operating system to support NetLedger's special needs for scalability, redundancy and performance. ASPs who build their own, high-volume, one-to-many solutions push technology in directions that enterprise computing providers do not cater for in their current designs, so rapid access to operating system enhancements is a must. "Using an Open Source solution was really key to this," said Durkee, whereas using a packaged operating system would have meant waiting in line for the next release.

NetLedger's data centre runs its own application code on Oracle and VA-Linux. Data is stored on Network Appliance file servers using Network File System (NFS), while encryption accelerators from Rainbow Technologies speed the processing of secure transactions.

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