How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Database Systems
Transcription
How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Database Systems
An Oracle Business White Paper December 2013 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Executive Overview ........................................................................... 2 Introduction ....................................................................................... 3 Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database ................................ 5 Designed to Run the Oracle Database Better ................................ 5 Configuration Sizes for Different Needs ......................................... 6 Lowering the Total Cost of Ownership ............................................... 7 Example Five-year Total Cost of Ownership Analysis .................... 8 Reducing Risk to Business Operations ............................................ 10 Improving Total System Availability ............................................. 10 Enhancing Security...................................................................... 11 Reducing Deployment and Interoperability Risks ......................... 12 Boosting User Productivity and Business Agility .............................. 13 Higher Performance Improves Productivity .................................. 13 Achieving Agility Through Scaling and Reconfiguration ............... 13 Conclusion ...................................................................................... 15 References ...................................................................................... 17 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Executive Overview Traditionally, as organizations deployed new databases, new systems were deployed, adding to equipment sprawl, increasing data center complexity, and escalating costs in the data center. As a result, IT investments often sat underutilized yet unavailable for the next project need. By consolidating databases onto shared infrastructure, organizations are better positioned to manage database infrastructure to achieve faster business results, scale systems with usage growth, and quickly react to new business opportunities. This paper outlines how Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database can help IT departments consolidate database services and better utilize resources while containing their infrastructure costs. This paper has been updated to include Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition, which features a new multitenant architecture that simplifies the process of consolidating databases onto the cloud, enabling customers to manage many databases as one without changing their applications. The solution brings three significant advantages: It defines a scalable architecture that enables consolidation of Oracle Database infrastructure, simplifies operations, and lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) for operating a number of databases. A sample TCO analysis in this paper shows how a 50 percent savings can be achieved by replacing older infrastructure with a configuration based on Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database. The solution reduces risk because it outlines proven configurations and best practices that increase security, protect data, reduce human error, and minimize disruptions to business. The solution increases agility and productivity, helping IT organizations react quickly to changes in business strategies and scaling to support new programs, larger capacities, more users, and higher transaction volumes. A companion technical paper, “How to Consolidate, Optimize, and Deploy Oracle Database Environments including Multitenant Database with Flexible Virtualized Services,” describes the solution architecture in greater detail. 2 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Introduction Organizations in almost every industry rely on data-driven applications for strategic business operations—enterprise resource planning (ERP), online transaction procession (OLTP), data warehousing, decision support, and other business-critical tasks. Since database systems drive these core business functions, they have a direct impact on productivity, competitive position, and profitability. Database systems must store, protect, and deliver information reliably, securely, and in a timely fashion. IT organizations continually strive to remove system performance constraints, scale services to support increasingly complex analytics on rapidly increasing data volumes, and maintain high service levels, all while controlling costs and staying within budget. To assist organizations in accomplishing these goals, Oracle supplies a full complement of database infrastructure offerings, ranging from engineered systems—such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle SuperCluster—to Oracle Optimized Solutions that deliver performance, security, and reliability using a comprehensive Oracle software and hardware stack. Oracle designs engineered systems to reduce the cost and complexity of IT infrastructure while increasing performance, manageability, and customer value. Oracle Exadata Database Machine is an engineered system designed to accelerate Oracle Database 11g and 12c services for data warehousing and OLTP applications. Oracle SuperCluster engineered systems are Oracle's fastest and most scalable engineered systems, and they are ideal for consolidating databases and applications, private cloud deployments, and Oracle software. They deliver extreme performance, the highest consolidation, availability, and efficiency, and eliminate the risks of build-it-yourself architectures. With the world's fastest processors and Oracle Exadata Storage Servers optimized for Oracle Database, Oracle SuperCluster delivers unprecedented price/performance for mission-critical databases and applications. 3 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems While these factory-integrated engineered systems have tremendous value for many customers, they might not be the optimal solution for all sites and all business needs. Engineered systems are purchased and shipped as specific configurations, so they aren’t the best fit for organizations that might not require or be in a position to benefit from the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers included with those products. With Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database, organizations can continue to invest in SAN storage or other currently installed technologies yet also benefit from technology advancements that are enabled by using multiple Oracle products together. Bringing together Oracle products and technologies at each tier, Oracle Optimized Solutions act as a blueprint to implement a complete solution, saving money, reducing integration risk, improving productivity, and shortening time to deployment. Oracle performs extensive testing and validation so that each solution reflects proven best practices that address important challenges in the enterprise. Deploying an Oracle Optimized Solution also means that there is a single point of accountability for purchasing, deployment, maintenance services, and ongoing support. 4 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database combines state-of-the-art Oracle products and technologies in an architecture that consolidates, simplifies, and accelerates Oracle Database system deployments. As shown in Figure 1, the solution architecture leverages Oracle components—storage and compute systems, built-in virtualization, the Oracle Solaris operating system, and, of course, the Oracle Database software itself. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c manages the database environment through an intuitive administrative interface while Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c supplies management and monitoring of Oracle server hardware, firmware, operating systems, virtual servers, and updates. The solution is an attractive foundation for data-driven applications from Oracle or independent software vendors (ISVs). Designed to Run the Oracle Database Better Oracle has made significant engineering investments to improve the results when Oracle products are used together. These cross-product optimizations deliver advantages in areas such as performance, security, system reliability, and ease of data center operations. A few examples of these efforts include Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM for SPARC—Built-in virtualization technologies enable consolidating multiple Oracle Database instances safely on dense SPARC servers, allowing databases to be centralized while also providing isolation for security and maintaining predictable performance. Oracle Database 12c Cloning—The integration of Oracle Database 12c cloning with the Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance snapshot feature allows DBAs to create copies of their databases with a simple database command. This allows database staff the freedom to manage copies of their databases to improve the management of test and QA projects. Transparent Data Encryption—When this Oracle Database feature is enabled, the database automatically accesses on-core cryptography engines in the solution’s servers to protect sensitive data, allowing organizations to use encryption pervasively to reduce risk with little impact on performance and administration. While Oracle Database releases are available for a number of commercially available operating systems, virtualization technologies, and hardware platforms, there are unique advantages of running Oracle Database services on an Oracle infrastructure. 5 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Figure 1. Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database leverages a complete stack of Oracle products and technologies to streamline mission-critical database deployments. Configuration Sizes for Different Needs Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database can be deployed on configurations of various sizes. All configurations share the same underlying architecture and are based on Oracle’s enterprise-class platforms, creating an infrastructure solution that is highly scalable, optimized for Oracle Database performance, and engineered to support continuous availability of business-critical databases and applications. Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database targets the following goals: Lowering the total cost of ownership for database systems Reducing risk and maintaining continuous availability of IT and business operations Increasing user productivity and business agility The remainder of this paper explores how the solution helps organizations attain these objectives. 6 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Lowering the Total Cost of Ownership When consolidating using Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database, there are a number of factors that contribute to containing costs while enabling growth: Higher consolidation ratios—Oracle Optimize Solution for Oracle Database leverages the world's fastest database and enterprise Java servers. These new systems provide significantly higher processing power, memory bandwidth, and capacity, as well as the latest-generation I/O architecture, resulting in numerous performance world records1. With higher performing systems, a larger number of databases can be supported per system resulting in fewer deployed systems, lower maintenance costs, less administration, energy savings, and less data center floor space. Higher data compression—The integration of Oracle storage products and Oracle Database to deliver Hybrid Columnar Compression reduces storage needs and drives more efficient use of storage resources. HCC can reduce storage needs by 10 to 50 times and accelerate query performance by greatly reducing the size of data transfers from storage to CPU during these operations. These effects combine to deliver better results from storage investments. Faster deployment—The time and effort expended from project conception to full operation can be reduced by as much as 50 percent with an Oracle Optimized Solution. Oracle Engineering has invested considerable effort architecting, testing, validating, and tuning this solution, reducing the need for trial-and-error tuning, extensive integration testing, and HA validation onsite. Designed-in virtualization—Designed-in virtualization with Oracle Solaris Zones, network virtualization, and Oracle VM for SPARC provide everything needed to virtualize, consolidate, and manage a large database environment—at no extra cost. Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database provides fine-grained control of resources, down to the CPU thread, memory, I/O bus, and network levels. Oracle Multitenant 12c enables further virtualization of databases and improves the how Oracle Database uses system resources. For the latest information on the performance of Oracle’s SPARC systems, see https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/. 1 7 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Simplified administration—With an integrated family of tools designed to administer the environment, considerable time can be saved compared to working with a variety of multivendor tools. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c, part of the Oracle Enterprise Manager portfolio, provides an intuitive interface for monitoring and managing the solution hardware, firmware, virtual systems, operating system instances, administrative rights, patching, and updates. By adding other modules from the Oracle Enterprise Manager family, administrators can control Oracle Database instances and Oracle Applications across the entire enterprise. Oracle has also invested in engineering best practices for this solution, including techniques that clone Oracle Database 11g databases and their virtual environments up to 50x faster than manual methods, simplifying and accelerating the creation of development and test systems. Guaranteed compatibility—New hardware deployments often include “hidden” costs, such as forced software upgrades or rework of custom code and utilities. Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database features Oracle Solaris, which runs applications, utilities, and databases unchanged across Oracle Solaris releases providing investment protection and avoiding unplanned upgrade costs. These are a few examples of advanced engineering efforts that enable organizations to deploy and operate a more efficient database environment that delivers better services while containing costs. Example Five-year Total Cost of Ownership Analysis To demonstrate the level of potential savings, this section presents a five-year TCO analysis, comparing the costs of operating an existing farm of legacy UNIX systems to the costs of deploying and operating a new Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database based on Oracle’s SPARC T5 servers. Database workloads, coupled with performance data from proof-of-concept testing, were used to develop a proposed configuration that delivers the same level of performance. Equivalent SANbased RAID 5 storage and Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g licenses were used as the basis of both configurations. For the Oracle Optimized Solution case, Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) licenses were added to the configuration to enhance the value provided by the solution with full database high availability. The TCO analysis in Figure 2 demonstrates that there is a considerable financial benefit to upgrading from legacy systems—Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise M5000 systems, in this example—to Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database. This was the case including the enhanced availability offered by Oracle RAC on the Oracle Optimized Solution configuration. Similar savings can be expected for other server models or UNIX system vendors. Highlights of the results include the following: A five-year TCO savings of US$5.25 million, approximately 50 percent of the five-year TCO for the legacy systems solution 53 percent lower hardware costs, taking into account the cost of acquiring the proposed solution as well as service and support costs for both the legacy and the proposed systems A 7-to-1 ratio of server platforms when consolidating SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers onto a configuration of Oracle’s SPARC T5-4 servers 8 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems 4x lower power and cooling costs 5x less floor space used Database availability with Oracle RAC built into the new configuration Figure 2. Five-year TCO comparison between new Oracle Optimized Solution deployment and legacy installation. Key Assumptions for Five-Year TCO Analysis TCO analysis was done using industry-accepted formulas. Power consumption and floor space requirements sourced from Oracle published data. Performance/sizing data used from internal Oracle testing results. TCO analysis includes cost of servers, storage, SAN infrastructure, hardware maintenance, Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g license, operating system RTU, and costs for software maintenance, floor space, and estimated power and cooling. No annual usage growth rate was applied. Hardware deflation rate used was 15 percent and base inflation rate was 5 percent. The legacy configuration included six SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers, each with eight SPARC64 VI 2.15-GHz processors and 128 GB of RAM; eight SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers, each with eight SPARC64 VI 2.66-GHz processors and 128 GB of RAM; and 34 TB of usable of mid-range SAN-attached storage connected through 72 FC SAN ports. The proposed configuration included two SPARC T5-4 servers, each with four SPARC T5 3.6-GHz processors and 2 TB of RAM. A Pillar Axiom 600 array from Oracle was configured with two slammers and six bricks (disk trays) for a total of 34 TB of usable RAID 5 storage and 48 ports of 16 Gb SAN switching. 9 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Reducing Risk to Business Operations Oracle Optimized Solutions reduce overall risk to business operations by offering a proven architecture that Oracle prevalidates for compatibility, performance, and reliability. Oracle Engineering implements and tests the solution through an iterative process. The solution architecture addresses the need for continuous database availability, incorporating redundant components, fault detection, and clustering technologies to reduce the risk of a production outage. “Twenty percent of respondents report having three or more days of unplanned downtime during the past year, and close to half report three or more days of planned downtime. Whether it’s planned or unplanned, there is a cost to downtime, and most respondents report their businesses regularly feel the effects of these interruptions—both at a business and IT operational level.” Joseph McKendrick “Enterprise Data and the Cost of Downtime” 2012 IOUG Database Availability Survey, Unisphere Research, July 2012 Improving Total System Availability Significant investments have been made in the Oracle software and hardware stack to ensure that the highest possible levels of availability can be achieved. Engineering work around maximizing availability is focused in three areas. The first area targets planned and maintenance outages by increasing the variety of operational tasks that can be performed during live operations. The second area focuses on the management of minor problems that can be done without removing systems or components from service. The third area is providing automatic service restoration in the event of a major system, network, or storage problem. The following are examples of some of the unique availability advantages of Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database: Oracle Solaris Optimized Shared Memory—Oracle Solaris 11.1 has been architected to provide support for massive compute and memory capacity. With Optimized Shared Memory, the database’s system global area (SGA) can be resized online without a reboot or a database restart, providing greater flexibility and the ability to scale for growth without impacting user access to database services. Additionally, database startup and shutdown time is 8x faster, so when a shutdown is required, the outage time can be reduced. Live migration—Logical domains containing Oracle Database instances can be migrated between servers without downtime. This allows hardware service and upgrades or software maintenance to be performed without requiring a maintenance shutdown. Live migration requires that the source and target servers have shared access to storage and networking. Predictive Self-Healing—This Oracle Solaris feature enables SPARC servers to predict component failures accurately and mitigates many serious problems before they actually occur. The system receives data related to hardware and software errors, and the system automatically diagnoses the underlying problem. Once diagnosed, the system automatically responds by offlining faulty components. Removing degraded components before they actually fail minimizes the impact on users and operations. 10 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Domain reconfiguration—Depending on the system, some configurations permit reconfiguration (removing or adding physical hardware and cards) while the database environment is still running. This allows hardware repairs or upgrades to occur without disrupting the system or the database operations. Protection against individual component failures—Oracle’s SPARC servers provide redundant power supplies, cooling, storage connections, and network connections. Unique among enterprise-class UNIX systems, Oracle’s SPARC M6-32 servers can tolerate a CPU failure, a memory failure, or the failure of a level 1, level 2, or level 3 cache without shutting down an entire server or virtual system. The result is not only continued operation but also minimal impact to users, performance, database services, and hosted applications. Protection against system failures—Oracle RAC supports the transparent deployment of a single database across pools of servers, providing fault tolerance from hardware failures or planned outages. Oracle RAC supports mainstream business applications of all kinds, including OLTP, decision-support system (DSS), and mixed OLTP/DSS environments. While Oracle RAC is available for many platforms, it has been fully tested and validated in the Oracle Optimized Solutions configurations. Quality of service (QoS) for storage—Because storage often is a resource that is shared among databases, applications, and other components, deployments can face a risk if activity on one system unexpectedly impacts another system. Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600 storage systems allow organizations to differentiate between QoS levels that different applications and databases require. Administrators can use the Pillar Axiom user interface to assign a QoS priority, allowing the storage environment to deliver expected I/O performance for high-priority workloads even when other activity is underway. Enhancing Security The Oracle Solaris operating system provides unparalleled security features, including many that originated in previous military-grade versions of the operating system. In conjunction with Oracle Solaris Zones, the operating system offers a sophisticated user and process rights management scheme that supports secure multitenancy of sensitive databases and applications within the same system. User rights management in Oracle Solaris allows administrators to create an oracle role and assign it to multiple users with DBA responsibilities. Oracle’s SPARC T4, SPARC T5, and SPARC M6-32 servers incorporate processors that support widely used cryptographic algorithms, accelerating them in hardware. When the Transparent Data Encryption feature is used to encrypt sensitive data in an Oracle Database, it optimizes performance using hardware-based cryptographic acceleration in these systems’ processors. Since many laws and regulations mandate the protection of identities, financial data, health records, and other sensitive data, organizations can implement secure queries without imposing a performance penalty or the additional cost of add-on encryption devices. For further information about Transparent Data Encryption with Oracle Database, see “High Performance Security for Oracle Database and Fusion Middleware Applications using SPARC T4.” 11 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Reducing Deployment and Interoperability Risks Extensive solution testing benefits enterprise deployments because it lowers risk, preventing delays that can otherwise occur during build-out and implementation. With Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database, everything that is required to deploy a mission-critical database system—ranging from advanced database functionality to the disk drives where data is stored—has been predefined and tested. By providing a complete solution that spans the database, clustering, virtualization, file system and volume management, operating system, servers, networks, disk storage, and management tools, Oracle removes many of the complexities that are common in constructing a complete database infrastructure. Figure 3 shows the broad variety of technologies needed to support a database solution and illustrates the complexity involved in building a solution using components from multiple vendors. Challenges can include integrating and testing technology stacks, determining initial compatibility (and compatibility after subsequent updates), managing the environment, and dealing with different service and support organizations. In contrast, deploying Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database implies A complete solution that is optimized and tested to support mission-critical database environments Hardware and software designed and tested to work together to avoid compatibility issues and to maximize the quality of the overall solution A single service and support organization for the entire environment Availability of an integrated portfolio of management tools—Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center—that can be used to manage the environment, including applications, the database, virtual systems, the operating system, storage, firmware, administrative rights, patching and updates, and more Figure 3. Oracle provides a comprehensive single-vendor solution that reduces deployment and interoperability risk. 12 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Boosting User Productivity and Business Agility Higher Performance Improves Productivity Increased database system performance can translate directly into gains in efficiency and productivity for application users. These gains can have a direct financial impact on key business metrics, for example: Faster response times and lower latency can supply a strategic competitive advantage, improving the user experience, increasing customer loyalty, and boosting sales. Processing more transactions in a given time can allow workers to be more productive, allowing them, for example, to handle more sales or support calls per hour. Reduced query times can enable business decisions to be made earlier and allow for additional analysis, enabling more-informed decision-making. As mentioned earlier in the paper, Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database leverages the world’s fastest database and enterprise Java servers that hold over twenty-performance world records1. Achieving Agility Through Scaling and Reconfiguration Once a mission-critical database system is deployed and operating, it must adjust and scale to meet future business requirements. Two factors contribute to the inherent agility of database systems: Initial system sizing, including built-in expansion to accommodate growth in database capacity, transaction volumes, and applications The ability of the solution to incorporate enhancements and expand throughout its lifecycle Since critical database systems are often deployed for five years or longer, it is sometimes difficult to project future needs accurately. Events such as acquisitions, new partnerships, new applications, or unanticipated user growth can dictate performance requirements that are hard to foresee. Even with the best capacity planning efforts, the flexibility to scale and grow can determine the actual lifespan of a production system. 13 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Scaling a database system extends beyond CPU performance and encompasses total memory capacity, I/O throughput and latency, storage capacity, networking, and the scalability of the operating system kernel. Oracle Database systems provide the ability to scale in several dimensions in response to changing business needs without disrupting operations or requiring extensive IT administrative effort. Examples include the following: Scaling through density and advanced multithreading—Database growth, such as higher transaction volumes or an increased number of records, can drive the need for greater processing power and associated memory. The Oracle Solaris operating system and Oracle’s SPARC server line have long led the industry at the high end of performance scaling. Oracle Solaris naturally takes advantage of the advanced thread scale and memory density of the SPARC T4, SPARC T5, and SPARC M6-32 servers in this solution. The SPARC T5 servers effectively double the number of cores and threads from the previous generation of SPARC T4 servers, enabling the support of larger workloads within the same form factor. The SPARC M6-32 system scales up to a maximum of 32 SPARC M6 processors and an unprecedented 3072 threads. Reconfiguration of system resources—Virtualization technologies and systems that support reconfiguration make it easy for administrators to adjust resource allocations to match workloads. Logical domains (configured with Oracle VM Server for SPARC) and Oracle Solaris Zones are easily reconfigured to add or remove system resources on a domain or zone, helping virtual environments to scale to meet growth needs. For logical domains, resources can be reconfigured dynamically while database services continue to operate. Scaling node count—When CPU and memory slots on available servers are fully utilized, additional processing capacity and memory can be added by deploying more cluster nodes in an Oracle RAC configuration. This can be done live, avoiding any impact to the applications currently in use. Increasing I/O performance and reducing storage footprint—Unique to Oracle storage, Hybrid Columnar Compression technology is a technique for compressing data in a database block before sending it to storage in the solution. As the name implies, Hybrid Columnar Compression uses a hybrid approach—a combination of both row and columnar methods—for storing data. Enterprises with existing Oracle Database instances and in-database archives for OLTP, data warehousing, or mixed workloads can achieve 10x to 50x reductions in data volumes by using Hybrid Columnar Compression on the Pillar Axiom 600 or Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance products. Sites that implement Hybrid Columnar Compression have experienced as much as 3x to 5x reductions in their overall storage footprints. Also, there can be significant performance gains because data moved between the Oracle Database server and storage is compressed, so there is less data to transmit. Increasing I/O performance using Hybrid Storage Pools. Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance is designed to recognize I/O patterns automatically, and it places data on the best storage media using a Hybrid Storage Pool approach. This technique results in impressive gains in read and write performance, taking advantage of low-latency solid-state drives (SSDs) that act as a cache between the storage server and the hard disks in the storage array. 14 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Expanding storage capacity and throughput—Pillar Axiom 600 storage systems allow for live expansion to grow both capacity and I/O performance without disrupting access to storage. Unlike with many storage products, the Pillar Axiom 600 architecture allows organizations to scale the system bandwidth and RAID processing power as well as traditional storage capacity without disruption while the system is in use. Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database provides tremendous flexibility throughout the deployment lifecycle. Because the underlying SPARC servers offer advanced thread scale (with up to 3072 threads in the SPARC M6-32 system), the solution features dramatic scalability for efficient consolidation and expansion of Oracle Database workloads over time. Conclusion Database systems are vital to the success of business and government entities of all sizes, which is why IT departments strive to deliver database services with optimal performance and service levels. When deploying Oracle Database, IT managers must take into account strategic business goals and three core objectives—reducing costs, lowering risk, and improving support for business operations. Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database is designed to help companies achieve these goals. Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database is a fully tested, tuned, and documented architecture for consolidating Oracle Database workloads onto a highly available, scalable, and secure infrastructure. It brings together a complete hardware and software stack that is engineered for optimal performance and mission-critical availability, helping IT organizations efficiently and cost-effectively support fundamental business processes and data-driven operations. Different configurations are available to match workload size, the databases to be consolidated, and site requirements. The solution offers tight integration with Oracle Database, offering resilient platforms for continuous data availability, even for the most demanding applications. And since the solution stack is based on components that are all available from Oracle—a trusted business partner— implementing the solution gives organizations a single touch point for purchasing, deployment, services, training, and ongoing support. 15 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems Table 1 summarizes key advantages and business benefits. TABLE 1. ORACLE OPTIMIZED SOLUTION FOR ORACLE DATABASE—KEY ADVANTAGES AND BUSINESS BENEFITS BUSINESS BENEFIT HOW ORACLE OPTIMIZED SOLUTION ENABLES THE BUSINESS BENEFIT Contain costs Built with the fastest servers for Oracle Database, the solution enables organizations to operate Oracle Database with less hardware, fewer licenses, and a smaller footprint resulting in lower overall costs. Guidelines for a tested and tuned solution greatly simplify deployment and management. The solution is administered with a consistent set of tools that work together to simplify administration. Reduce risk Solution components are designed and validated together, helping sites avoid compatibility issues and unforeseen problems. Patches and updates are tested on the full solution, not just on individual components. Highly reliable systems, a high availability architecture, redundant hot-pluggable components, and predictive self-healing capabilities reduce the risk of downtime. Boost productivity and Massive thread scale in the solution’s SPARC servers supports excellent scalability. business agility The solution provides integrated virtualization with fine-grained control of resources, down to the CPU thread, memory, I/O bus, and network levels. The ability to scale a database system by growing the Oracle RAC cluster without downtime enables immediate upgrades, eliminating the need to wait for planned downtime. 16 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems References For more information, see the resources listed in Table 2. TABLE 2. RESOURCES FOR FURTHER INFORMATION WEB RESOURCES Oracle Optimized Solution http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/oos/database/overview/index.html for Oracle Database Oracle Optimized Solution http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/oos/database/overview/index.html for Enterprise Database Cloud WHITE PAPERS How to Consolidate, http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/hardware-solutions/o12-032-howto-db- Optimize, and Deploy throughput-avail-1592601.pdf Oracle Database Environments including Multitenant with Flexible Virtualized Services (technical paper) “Benefits of Deploying a http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/edbc-cloud-sparc-supercluster-1899065.pdf Cloud to Deliver Database as a Service” “The SPARC Difference: http://oracle-downloads.com/sparc_difference.pdf Reduce Risks, Cut Costs, Power Innovation” 17 How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Copyright © 2013. Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This December 2013, Version 3 document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in Authors: Ken Kutzer, Roger Bitar, and Larry law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any McIntosh liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our Oracle Corporation prior written permission. World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. 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