Ingres prepares application appliances

Ingres offers firms ready-made infrastructure stack

Open-source database developer Ingres plans to release its Project Icebreaker program in November, combining database services and operating system code in a lightweight infrastructure stack designed to serve as a platform for applications.

The company announced Icebreaker, developed with RPath, at LinuxWorld in August, describing it as a “soft appliance” that makes the operating system invisible to administrators and end-users. It can be installed on bare-metal servers or as a virtual server instance. Ingres said deployment takes just six minutes and lets other programs talk to the stack via JDBC, ODBC or .Net.

Ingres chief technology officer Dave Dargo said Icebreaker will also be made available through hardware appliance partners as well as for download when the code reaches production stage in December.

That approach carries echoes of Oracle’s Raw Iron project that was announced in 1998 as a way to run databases on dedicated hardware using a sliver of Solaris operating-system code.
However, Dargo, who himself spent 15 years at Oracle, said there are important differences.

“Oracle wasn’t providing integrated maintenance; it was using a closed-source database and a closed-source operating system, on a narrow set of hardware platforms. We’re running Ingres GPL, Linux GPL, throwing away everything a database doesn’t need [and running the code] on a wide array of hardware.”

Separately, Dargo said he is sceptical about Oracle’s recently announced plan to offer a support package for Red Hat Linux, describing it as a decision provoked by Red Hat’s high stock valuation rather than business gains.

“There tends to be a very emotional reaction to a lot of things at Oracle,” Dargo said. “[Oracle chief executive] Larry Ellison says that Red Hat has nothing but it has an installed base, a relationship with that installed base and a reputation as the highest-value Linux.”