Implementation Study: Dell IT Scales Supply Chain Management with Oracle 10g RAC (149KB) 
By Dave Jaffe and Todd Muirhead, Dell Enterprise Technology Center, and Tiong Tey and Raveendra Avutu, Dell Information Technology
In 2005, Dell's Information Technology group was faced with a supply chain management system that had reached its limits on expensive, proprietary servers running the Unix operating system. The group undertook the complete migration of the system to Oracle 10g Real Application Clusters running on low-cost industry standards-based Dell Power Edge servers. By moving the application to Dell servers when it did, Dell IT avoided significant new expenditures in proprietary Unix-based servers, achieved increased server uptime, and provided an easy path for growing the systems as needed by adding additional servers to the cluster. This paper documents in detail the scope of the supply chain management system, and the advantages of migrating it from Unix-based servers to Dell PowerEdge servers.
Monitoring Dell 9G Servers in Oracle GRID (268KB)
By Dave Jaffe
Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control enables Oracle system and database administrators to manage large Oracle Grids. Oracle and Dell have recently worked together to integrate Oracle Enterprise Manager with Dell's OpenManage software to provide Dell hardware-specific data within Oracle Enterprise Manager. The server hardware metrics can be monitored and managed just like Oracle database metrics. This integration of Oracle Enterprise Manager and Dell OpenManage provides a powerful tool for managing Oracle Grid on Dell PowerEdge servers within a single console. The simplification stemming from a single console, with its single log for hardware, operating system and application exceptions, is a key value proposition of Dell's Scalable Enterprise. Through concrete examples this paper documents best practices in the installation and configuration of Oracle Enterprise Manager and Dell OpenManage, including detailed instructions on how to monitor and manage alerts coming from the servers.
Enterprise Database Performance on Dual Core Servers: A Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge 2850 and HP ProLiant DL385(292KB)
By Todd Muirhead and Dave Jaffe
In order to illustrate the performance advantage of Intel Xeon dual core two socket servers over Hewlett-Packard two socket servers with AMD Opteron processors, the same on-line transaction processing (OLTP) workload was run on a Dell PowerEdge 2850 using Intel Xeon dual core processors and the HP ProLiant DL385 AMD dual core Opteron-based server. The Dell PowerEdge 2850 was able to complete 10% more orders per minute than the HP DL385 while being 8% less expensive resulting in an 18% price/performance advantage.
An Enterprise Database Performance Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge 6850 and the Sun Fire V490 UltraSPARC Server(200KB)
By Todd Muirhead and Dave Jaffe
Both the Intel x86 and Sun SPARC architectures have moved into the realm of multicore processors. In this study of four socket, dual core database servers from Dell and Sun, the Dell PowerEdge 6850 with Intel's fastest four socket processors significantly outperforms the much more expensive Sun Fire V490 with four of Sun's fastest UltraSPARC IV+ processors.
An Enterprise Database Performance Comparison of the Dell PowerEdge 2950 and the Sun Fire V490 UltraSPARC Server(202KB)
By Dave Jaffe and Todd Muirhead
In a previous study of Intel x86 and Sun SPARC multicore processor-based servers from Dell and Sun, we compared two four socket, dual core servers, the Dell PowerEdge 6850 and the Sun Fire V490. In this study we compare a 2-node cluster of Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers with the fastest Intel two socket processors against the Sun Fire V490 with four of Sun's fastest UltraSPARC IV+ processors. The Dell cluster has the same number of cores, eight, as the Sun four socket server, but outperforms the Sun Fire V490 while providing the high availability of a cluster.
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