Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) and HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced new European customers for Oracle9i Real Application Clusters (RAC) running on industry-standard HP ProLiant servers, powered by the Intel® Xeon™ processor family. These customers, which span the healthcare, financial and human resources industries, rely on the ProLiant Parallel Database Cluster running Oracle9i RAC for data consolidation, centralised administration, 24x7 availability, scalability, no single point of failure and significant cost-savings.
"In today’s environment, IT managers are clearly seeking ways to help their businesses achieve overall cost savings and provide solid returns on IT investments, while still benefiting from business improvements through new technology," said Tim Payne, director, Oracle9i, Oracle EMEA. "Oracle9i RAC on HP ProLiant servers empowers IT managers by giving them data consolidation, reliable availability and scalability, and centralised administration to streamline processes for employees throughout an organisation and result in significant cost savings."
Technology plays an essential role in administration and medical activities at Nordland Central Hospital, the oldest and largest hospital in Norway’s Nordland County, and one of the first to pioneer a digital patient information system from DIPS, an ISV specialising in records organisation software. Because of the absolutely critical nature of the system, DIPS selected Oracle9i RAC running on a ProLiant Parallel Database Cluster, including HP ProLiant servers equipped with Pentium® III Xeon™ processor MP technology, and HP StorageWorks MA8000 and RA4100, for the hospital. The integrated solution allows hospital staff access to patient records via 800 networked PCs located in all relevant departments of the hospital and in doctors’ offices. Besides building an impressive hub for centralised administration, hospital staff have also gained rapid, full-time availability to vital patient information.
DIPS itself uses Oracle9i RAC on two HP ProLiant servers for development and testing and is currently implementing another Oracle9i RAC and ProLiant Parallel Database Cluster solution for a second hospital in Norway. DIPS estimates there is a potential for approximately 20 more hospitals in Norway to establish similar solutions in the future.
Kreissparkasse Esslingen-Nürtingen, one of the most innovative savings banks in Germany, is a pioneer in offering the most advanced services to its 411,000 customers. To support these services and maintain its high service level, the bank needed to upgrade and enhance its in-house IT infrastructure. Kreissparkasse Esslingen-Nürtingen chose an integrated Windows‚-based solution from HP, Oracle and Intel that could interface with its existing HP StorageWorks SAN environment and provide an extremely rapid deployment in eight days. The resulting solution of Oracle9i RAC on HP ProLiant DL580 servers with Intel® Pentium® III Xeon™ processor MP technology offers Kreissparkasse Esslingen-Nürtingen a number of benefits.
Achieving its primary goal to set up a fully integrated system that would provide a very low cost of ownership once it was up and running, the bank also met its tight eight-day deadline with an absolute minimum amount of downtime. Customers have benefited with full-time availability through a fault-tolerant multi-node set up, which also has the power to scale easily to handle heavy increases in demand as the bank expands or customer use increases.
Belgium-based Partena provides outsourced salary and social security administration services for more than 32,000 companies with an average of 20 employees. The company’s 2,000 employees generate more than 300,000 pay slips each month. Partena originally ran its operations on a mainframe, but determined that it needed to implement a more flexible IT solution which would allow it to automate most tasks. This solution would increase staff productivity and improve customer service by freeing employees to work in other areas with higher value-add.
Partena began working with consulting group Formatech on the development and deployment of the WebSalary solution. Formatech selected Oracle9i RAC on the ProLiant Parallel Database Cluster with Intel® Pentium® III Xeon™ MP processors to help Partena achieve its goals. This platform is capable of running a load-intensive online service and dependable in offering 24x7 availability, scalability and affordability. Since implementing the integrated solution, Partena has gained all of these capabilities and doubled the number of customers it can manage.
"Our partnering with Oracle and Intel is directly aimed at helping our customers achieve massive cost savings without sacrificing any aspect of their business," said Francois Bornibus, vice president, Industry Standard Servers, HP EMEA. "These customers chose HP ProLiant servers for their strong reputation in the market to deliver on availability and scalability needs, as well as for their integration capabilities with best-of-breed offerings such as Oracle9i RAC and Intel processors."
John Woodget, managing director for Computing and Solutions Marketing, Intel EMEA, said, "Running database solutions on clusters of Intel processor-based servers provides outstanding value to businesses. Companies which use high-end database applications, like Oracle9i RAC, benefit from the performance, reliability and flexibility of Intel server clusters. The Intel Xeon processor family-based servers and Intel Itanium® processor family-based servers continue to offer businesses an ideal and cost effective architecture on which to run their Oracle applications."
For more information about the HP ProLiant Parallel Database Cluster solution for Oracle9i RAC, please visit http://www.compaq.com/solutions/enterprise/highavailability/oracle.
About Oracle
Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at www.oracle.com.
About HP
HP is a leading global provider of products, technologies, solutions and services to consumers and businesses. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. HP completed its merger transaction involving Compaq Computer Corp. on May 3, 2002. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.
About Intel
Intel, the world's largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom
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