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Twenty-five years ago, Larry Ellison saw an opportunity other companies missed when he came across a description of a working prototype for a relational database and discovered that no company had committed to commercializing the technology. Ellison and his co-founders, Bob Miner and Ed Oates, realized there was tremendous business potential in the relational database model--but they may not have realized that they would change the face of business computing forever. Today Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) is still at the head of the pack. Oracle technology can be found in nearly every industry around the world and in the offices of 98 of the Fortune 100 companies. Oracle is the first software company to develop and deploy 100% internet-enabled enterprise software across its entire product line: database, business applications, and application development and decision support tools. Oracle is the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest independent software company. Oracle has always been an innovative company. It was one of the first companies to make its business applications available through the internet--today, that idea is pervasive. Now Oracle is committed to making sure that all of its software is designed to work together--the suite approach--and other companies, analysts, and the press are beginning to acknowledge that Oracle is right. What's in store for tomorrow? We will continue to innovate and to lead the industry--while always making sure that we're focused on solving the problems of the customers who rely on our software (http://www.oracle.com/corporate/index.html?story.html) We will first look at the hardware and software platforms to see how they measure up, and what, if any, special requirements are needed, as well as the costs that are associated with them. Next, we will look at the deployment of the application and what it takes to roll out a production system. Once the application is up and running, performance becomes the top priority of the data center. We can first note that the hardware and software requirements are similar. The abstraction to the application is also the same with both solutions - it gives an illusion of a single database and there is no need to modify the SQL code. The differences are in ease of deployment, performance and manageability. Both databases have similar cluster hardware requirements. A cluster is a group of independent servers that collaborate as a single system. The primary cluster components are processor nodes, a cluster interconnect (private network), and a disk subsystem.