an antidote for what pains it in the...

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An Antidote for What Pains IT in the DatacenterOracle Database 11g boosts availability while lowering TCO and amping up performance

Any datacenter investment should help to generate fi nancial and real business returns, so an important concern for IT managers is how to resolve the issue of single points of failure that can increase the level of risk. Indeed, 59 percent of the survey respondents listed single points of failure that increase the level of risk as a primary pain point (see slide 1). Forty-seven percent cited costs and 43 percent cited datacenter complexity as additional chronic challenges.

Certainly, any resolution to these datacenter pain points must correspond to the organization’s IT objectives. The IDG survey found that nearly two-thirds of IT managers (63 percent) anticipate improved application performance from datacenter investments; 57 percent also presume a reduction in opera-tional costs (see slide 2).

Likewise, datacenter solutions must respond to the dynamic nature of business today. Organizations expect their technol-ogy to help them gain considerable benefi ts. Nearly three out of four respondents to the IDG Research survey identifi ed increased customer satisfaction as one preferred result of datacenter investments, while an identical number described higher availability of uptime as equally important (see slide 3). .

When it comes to super-high availability and datacenter cost reductions, IT managers are facing what may seem like competing requirements. A recent IDG Research survey of IT managers, found that, when considering objectives for future investment in the datacenter, 70 percent identifi ed cost savings and downtime reduction as critical or very important.

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COMPLEX CHALLENGES, CLEAR SOLUTIONConsolidating servers onto a private cloud is an effective way to promote greater effi ciency and reduce the cost of down-time. Nearly 90 percent of the managers surveyed said they are targeting consolidation as a primary means to achieving their datacenter objectives within the next 12 months.

Some have already found a solution: By consolidating on Oracle Database 11g and Real Application Clusters (RAC), or-ganizations are discovering a clear path to lowering total cost of ownership while delivering on the high availability require-ments the business demands.

“The grid capabilities of Oracle Database 11g have enabled us to consolidate several databases and run mixed workloads in a high-performing and scalable environment,” says Plamen Zyumbyulev, head of Database Administration at M-Tel.

In addition, Oracle Exadata is proving itself as a major cog in the consolidation machinery. Exadata stands as the only da-tabase machine that can deliver the maximum performance required for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications. As such, it is an ideal platform for consolidating onto grids as well as private clouds. Exadata

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comes as a complete hardware, networking and software package that is highly secure and massively scalable, with built-in redundancy.

Oracle Database 11g packs an array of features and function-ality that address the particular challenges facing IT manag-ers, notably reducing costs and reducing downtime, as the IDG Research survey found. Oracle RAC and Oracle Database 11g enable a single database to run across a cluster of serv-ers, providing business-critical fault tolerance, the high levels of application performance users expect, and scalability with virtually no application changes.

Oracle Active Data Guard further helps IT chip away at datacenter costs. Active Data Guard enables your physical standby database to function for disaster recovery and at the same time eliminate idle redundancy. This database option enhances quality of service by offl oading resource-intensive read-only activities, such as reports and queries, from a production database to one or more synchronized standby databases. The result is greater performance of read/write activities on a production database and simultaneous im-provement in performance for read-only activities. The upside

63% Improved application performance

57% Reduced operational costs

47% Improved ability to meet decreasing

recovery time objectives (RTOs)

47% Improved ability to meet compliance

requirements

47% Reduced burden on IT staff

BASE: 61 respondents

What are the top fi ve IT BENEFITS your organization is expecting to gain from investments aimed at improving

the data center environment?

59% Single points of failure that increase

the level of risk

49% Lack of proper security controls

47% Maintaining expensive storage silos

43% Management complexity due to the

use of multiple tools

43% Coordinating multiple operating systems


What are your organization’s top fi ve PAIN POINTS with regard

to the data center?


is better quality of service and lower total cost of ownership.

“If you look at the economics of deploying Oracle Database 11g, there’s a huge win for this upgrade,” says Mike Prince, chief technology offi cer at Burlington Coat Factory.

SK Telecom has seen similar results from its deployments of Oracle datacenter solutions. Investing in Oracle, says Jin Hyung Lee, manager of SK Telecom’s Data Network Division, “allowed us to easily deploy high-performing data warehouses at a lower cost than competing products.”

FULFILLING IT OBJECTIVESFifty-nine percent of the IT managers surveyed by IDG Re-search cited single points of failure as their top datacenter pain point. For this, Oracle RAC is a fi tting antidote. Under RAC’s integrated database approach, single points of failure are effectively eliminated.

The mission-critical IT objective of improved application performance is met through the use of not only RAC but also Oracle Advanced Compression and Oracle Active Data Guard, which boosts performance by offl oading resource-intensive

WHITE PAPER: AN ANTIDOTE FOR WHAT PAINS IT IN THE DATACENTER 3

73% Higher availability/uptime

73% Improved customer satisfaction

49% Ability to accelerate the adoption

of new technology

47% Ability to respond more rapidly

to changing market needs

47% Improved security


What are the top fi ve BUSINESS BENEFITS your organization

is expecting to gain from investments aimed at improving

the data center environment?

jobs to synchronized standby databases. For example, when the IT group at Athens International Airport upgraded to Oracle Database 11g with Real Application Clusters, they realized an astonishing 800 percent improvement in applica-tion performance, largely due to the automation of many previously manual tasks.

MEETING BUSINESS DEMANDSHigh availability and customer satisfaction topped the IT man-agers’ list of desired business outcomes for their datacenter investments—and again, Oracle Database 11g responds to those wishes. At Intermap Technologies, which implemented Oracle Database 11g, the company’s 10-plus terabytes of data consist largely of elevation data and geometric images of Western Europe and the U.S., accessed by an international clientele. By using Active Data Guard, Intermap’s physical standby database is now operational and open to clients, distributors and partners for the fi rst time on a 24/7 basis while it is applying the changes to the database coming from its production facility.

Higher availability was a primary goal for Vinod Haval, vice president, Payments Domain, at Bank of America. Haval and his team deployed Oracle Database 11g and adopted the MAA (Maximum Availability Architecture) best practices, imple-menting Oracle RAC, Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Active Data Guard and Streams to ensure the maximum avail-ability, scalability and performance. The result? “We increased business value through improved system availability and per-formance, while maximizing return on investment,” Haval says.

PATHWAY TO LOWER TCO, HIGHER AVAILABILITYClearly, datacenter investments must deliver substantial technical returns—lower costs, less downtime and better application performance—while demonstrating sound busi-ness discretion. Organizations demand business returns in the form of increased customer satisfaction and higher avail-ability. Oracle Database 11g, with RAC, Active Data Guard and Advanced Compression, stands as a comprehensive data-center investment. It eliminates single points of failure, drives down costs and maximizes uptime—just what IT managers in the IDG Research survey said they need. Oracle Database 11g offers the clearest and most effi cient path to effective consolidation strategies.

This value proposition of Oracle Database 11g is perhaps best noted by the Cambridge, Mass.-based consulting fi rm Winter-Corp, which undertook an expert, independent review of this agile database solution. Its conclusion: “Overall, the advances in manageability in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and RAC are substantial and should help customers’ staff do more satisfying tasks with more positive business impact.” ■


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