DATABASE UPSTART AIMS AT ORACLE
by Dennis Mendyk

Start-up Clustra Systems is expected this week to unveil the latest step in its plan to convince the world that the best database technology for electronic commerce does not have an Oracle label on it.

Clustra (www.clustra.com) is set to take the wraps off version 3.0 of its Clustra Parallel Data Server, a database system built to meet the strict reliability standards of the public network industry. Clustra claims "five 9s" reliability for its product, which means its database operates without fail 99.999 percent of the time.

Unique architecture

The key to Clustra's reliability is its use of a parallel processing architecture, says Gary Ebersole, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Clustra. With Clustra's architecture, a failure in server hardware is detected within milliseconds, Ebersole says, and the database software simply redirects queries to another server running in parallel.

Clustra's roots are firmly in the public network market. The database technology underlying Clustra's product was developed in the mid-1990s at Telenor, which at the time was Norway's national phone company. As part of its move into a competitive market, Telenor spun off Clustra as a separate company in 1997.

Although Telenor is still counted as a Clustra investor, it doesn't control the company. In fact, Telenor set up Clustra as an independent operation based in the U.S. in part to foster a stronger competitive drive at the company, Ebersole says. "Start-ups are not a big thing in Norway," he notes. "The stock market there is nowhere nearly as dynamic as in the U.S."

For Clustra, the internal competitive drive has the company setting its sights on taking business away from Oracle, which is now widely acknowledged as the leading database supplier to the e-commerce industry.

Ebersole admits that Clustra still isn't ready to take on Oracle in the e-commerce venue, but he adds that the company will be ready to make its move in the fall, when it releases the next version of the Parallel Data Server.

"Oracle hasn't built five 9s availability into its hardware," Ebersole says. "If the server goes down, the database goes down."

Ebersole contends that e-commerce companies already are starting to look for more reliable engines on which to base their services. "High-availability is now a standard part of the [e-commerce] vocabulary," he says. "When applications are exposed to customers, unavailability becomes very expensive."

The latest version of Parallel Data Server runs on Sun Microsystems Solaris, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX and Microsoft Windows NT servers.