Cluster Computing:

LINUX DATA CENTER FEATURES POLYSERVE CLUSTERING SOFTWARE

Classified Ventures, LLC, a strategic joint-venture among six large media partners, has turned to PolyServe Matrix Server shared data clustering software to enable a highly scalable, available and manageable deployment of Oracle9i Real Application Clusters (RAC), PolyServe Inc. announced.

Classified Ventures migrated from UNIX to Linux to implement a new scale-out clustered architecture supporting Oracle9i RAC. The company joins such organizations as Datavantage, Dynamic Graphics, Experian and the U.S. Department of Defense in deploying Matrix Server software for Linux with clusters of low-cost, Intel Architecture-based servers in their mission- critical data centers.

"Our move to a PolyServe Matrix Server-Oracle9i RAC cluster on industry- standard Linux servers has resulted in a faster, more efficient IT architecture than our previous UNIX platform, and reduced our future capital cost over a three-year period by more than 60 percent versus the alternatives that we were considering," said Nancy Pejril, HomeScape technical operations manager, Classified Ventures.

Classified Ventures is a national provider of online classified advertising services in the automotive, apartments and real estate categories. It has the backing of six large media partners, including Belo Corp., Gannett Co., Inc., Knight Ridder, Inc., The McClatchy Company, Tribune Company and The Washington Post Company.

Currently, Classified Ventures operates three primary businesses: cars.com, Apartments.com and HomeScape ASP. HomeScape delivers private-label real estate Web technology and data management services for more than 100 U.S. daily newspapers. As more affiliate newspapers have adopted the HomeScape solution, HomeScape has updated its IT infrastructure to meet its growing business demands, move data more efficiently and support new Web functionality for its newspaper affiliates and their customers.

The new HomeScape configuration includes two PolyServe Matrix Server-enabled clusters of HP ProLiant servers running Oracle9i RAC on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and accessing a storage area network (SAN). HomeScape evaluated three alternatives to successfully implement a new scale-out architecture supporting Oracle9i RAC ­ two cluster file systems, including the PolyServe Matrix Server software, and raw devices. Only Matrix Server completely met HomeScape’s criteria for easy cluster scale-out as server and storage capacity demands grow, no single point of failure, a shared Oracle home for simplified database management and a general-purpose cluster file system (CFS) for Oracle and non-Oracle files.

"The PolyServe Matrix Server solution for Oracle9i RAC is not only more cost- effective than the alternative solutions we considered, but it also provides us performance benefits, helps us meet our service-level objectives, and makes it possible to conveniently update and expand our environment," said Jason Drapala, HomeScape database architect, Classified Ventures.