December 02, 2008, 8:43 PM — Oracle has contributed data-integrity protection code, partly developed with the hardware vendor Emulex, to the Linux kernel, the vendors announced Tuesday.
The code helps maintain "comprehensive data integrity" as information "moves from application to database, and from [the] Linux operating system to disk storage," according to a statement. It also lowers the possibility that erroneous data will get written to disk.
The companies' effort is meant to help data-center administrators track and address corrupted data quickly, lowering costs and downtime, said Scott McIntyre, vice president of product marketing at Emulex, in a statement.
Oracle and Emulex, which makes products for connecting servers, networks and storage systems, are developing an early-adopter program that will help customers start working with the new features.
When a lot of information is moving through various aspects of a system very quickly, its integrity can suffer, said Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady. And at the same time, data integrity grows more vital as systems scale up, he added.
But improvements like the code contribution announced Tuesday are only "one piece of the puzzle," and will work in tandem with next-generation Linux file systems now under development, such as Btrfs, he said.
The Btrfs project, now available under the GPL open-source license, was first developed at Oracle.
Oracle is a key contributor, along with other large vendors, to the kernel project. The company makes money on Linux through its Unbreakable Linux support service.
