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What was Old is New Again
It is ironic that the old mainframe architectures of the 1970’s
and 1980’s are now brand-new again. Back in the days of “data
processing,” it was not uncommon for a single server to host
more than a dozen databases.
The advent of the super-inexpensive Oracle servers is leading
the way back to server consolidation. There was nothing
inherently wrong with a centralized server environment, and in
many ways it was superior to the distributed client-server
architectures of the 1990’s.
When companies first started to leave the mainframe environment,
it was not because there were particular benefits to having a
number of tiny servers. Instead, it was a pure economic decision
based on the low cost of the UNIX-based minicomputers of the
day.
These minicomputers of the 1980’s could be purchased for as
little as $30k which was a bargain when compared to the 3
million dollar cost of a mainframe. As minicomputers evolved
into the UNIX-centric Oracle servers of the 1990’s, some shops
found themselves with hundreds of servers, one for each Oracle
database.
In fact, the migration away from the mainframe was a nightmare
for the Oracle DBA. Instead of a single server to manage, the
DBA had dozens or even hundreds of servers, each with its own
copy of the Oracle software.
The 1990’s was the age of “client-server computing,” where
multi-tiered applications were constructed with dozens of small
servers. Systems might have been comprised of a Web server
layer, an application server layer, and a database layer, each
with dozens of individual servers.
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