What Are the Differences Between Itanium and x86

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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users What Are the Differences Between Itanium and x86_64 CPUs? Post 302246868 by deckard on Tuesday 14th of October 2008 03:06:27 PM

10-14-2008

Registered User

What Are the Differences Between Itanium and x86_64 CPUs?

This is definitely a "stupid" question, but I can't think of anywhere else to ask it, so here goes. My knowledge of CPU history on big iron machines starts with the last DEC Alphas, a short stint with Sun servers, PA-RISC and Itanium, Intel 486s on the desktop before that, and Motorola 68000 CPUs on the desktop before that. This reflect my move from "toy" Atari ST, Macs and Amigas, to Windows 3.1 and then Linux at home and finally exposure to OpenVMS, Solaris and HP-UX at work.

Having been able to work with larger systems that get moderate to heavy use, I am now wondering whether or not it would be prudent to migrate some of our Oracle servers away from HP-UX on Itanium to some form of Linux on x86_64. My manager and our vendor both claim that Linux on x86_64 would never be able to handle the load, but I'm also aware that they don't really know much about that world to begin with. Admittedly, our current Oracle server on Itanium (a four year old system now) recently had some trouble keeping up with requests from the application server. Some of that was due to some default kernel parameters that were not changed. However, I've been really wondering now, whether or not the costs of keeping Oracle on HP-UX are warranted.

I understand their perspective that we're a big HP shop and have a relationship with support people and the like that would take years to build with anyone else if ever. But I think their fears might be unwarranted in that we might have a few more people on staff here who would be able to help with the upkeep of Linux boxes instead of HP-UX. But that is another matter... My core question is: Can an x86_64 box running something like RedHat Enterprise Linux with Oracle perform just as well as an Itanium running HP-UX with Oracle or is there some really gigantic difference? Right now we're looking at spending nearly $50,000 on a new server for Oracle, and I think with about $15,000 we could have a well equipped HP Xeon box with multiple cores and CPUs and just as much RAM. Am I all wet? Ignorant of some important issues (I admit my knowledge is lacking)?

deckard

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apache::session::oracle

Apache::Session::Oracle(3pm)				User Contributed Perl Documentation			      Apache::Session::Oracle(3pm)

NAME

       Apache::Session::Oracle - An implementation of Apache::Session

SYNOPSIS

	use Apache::Session::Oracle;

	#if you want Apache::Session to open new DB handles:

	tie %hash, 'Apache::Session::Oracle', $id, {
	   DataSource => 'dbi:Oracle:sessions',
	   UserName   => $db_user,
	   Password   => $db_pass,
	   Commit     => 1
	};

	#or, if your handles are already opened:

	tie %hash, 'Apache::Session::Oracle', $id, {
	   Handle => $dbh,
	   Commit => 1
	};

DESCRIPTION

       This module is an implementation of Apache::Session.  It uses the Oracle backing store and no locking.  See the example, and the
       documentation for Apache::Session::Store::Oracle for more details.

USAGE

       The special Apache::Session argument for this module is Commit.	You MUST provide the Commit argument, which instructs this module to
       either commit the transaction when it is finished, or to simply do nothing.  This feature is provided so that this module will not have
       adverse interactions with your local transaction policy, nor your local database handle caching policy.	The argument is mandatory in order
       to make you think about this problem.

       This module also respects the LongReadLen argument, which specifies the maximum size of the session object.  If not specified, the default
       maximum is 8 KB.

AUTHOR

       This module was written by Jeffrey William Baker <jwbaker@acm.org>.

SEE ALSO

       Apache::Session::File, Apache::Session::Flex, Apache::Session::DB_File, Apache::Session::Postgres, Apache::Session

perl v5.10.1							    2010-10-18					      Apache::Session::Oracle(3pm)

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