Intel demos four-way Xeon Linux system

Linux credibility in the enterprise market was boosted yesterday by an Intel demonstration of a data warehousing application running on a four-way Xeon server, Red Hat Linux and Oracle 8.05. The demo, which took place at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, used Torrent Systems' Orchestrate to boost multiprocessing capabilities. Many business intelligence processes execute sequentially, despite running on multi-processor systems, but by Orchestrate-enabling them the demonstration was able to increase processing speed dramatically. The application accessed 180GB of retail warehouse data and performed loading, sorting and indexing at an average throughput of 11.7GB/hour. "The combination of Intel and Torrent's technologies will enable users to realise the benefits of fully parallel, high-performance business intelligence solutions," said Allen Razdow, president and CEO of Torrent Systems. "Organisations are asking questions like 'Who are my most profitable customers?' 'What products do they buy and when?' 'How can I keep my customers from switching to another vendor?' Intel and Orchestrate will enable them to answer those questions--quickly and cost effectively." Orchestrate is a development and runtime environment for high-performance business intelligence. Torrent meanwhile is part of the Intel venture capital 'magic circle,' having received equity investment from the chip giant last month. Red Hat received a similar investment in September. ®