Power Up Your Enterprise Applications Get the Most Out of Your Oracle Environment
As the pace of business continues to accelerate, and digital transformation becomes a strategic imperative, it s essential that the underlying IT infrastructure that supports critical applications (apps) and Oracle databases is flexible and scalable to meet this challenging environment. Data growth demands and the requirement for real-time analytics and ongoing cost reductions create a challenging environment for IT leaders and their teams. To respond to growing demand from customers and internal users, mission-critical apps must always be available and deliver predictable performance. No one knows this better than database administrators (DBAs). DBAs growing challenges range from how to optimize their infrastructure to support business logic and critical operations, to unlocking business insights for smarter decision making. To perform these tasks successfully, DBAs must partner with internal business units and other key stakeholders. This partnership will reveal key insights that will help to create, support and efficiently run critical enterprise apps. These include customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) apps, as well as external-facing apps used by customers and partners. DBAs growing challenges range from how to optimize their infrastructure to support business logic and critical operations, to unlocking business insights for smarter decision making.
The Top 3 DBA Challenges In the course of helping Oracle DBAs and application owners satisfy business requirements and meet customer expectations, we have uncovered three recurring challenges: Limited Agility: Continuous Availability: Resource Constraints: Keep pace with customer and market demands. Application interruptions are simply not an option. Do more with less budget and staff, and fewer IT resources.
1 Limited Agility Line-of-business partners need to have the analytic capability to spot trends and capitalize on them, coupled with the ability to deliver new applications, solutions and services to market quickly. When a new application is being developed or is ready to be launched into production, the IT infrastructure must be agile enough to respond quickly and efficiently to these requirements. Unfortunately, the ability of IT to respond to increasingly frequent and urgent business demands often falls short of executive and customer expectations. This undermines new revenue opportunities, giving competitors a potential advantage in the market and wasting valuable human and technological resources.
Faced with IT s struggle to go faster, lines of business often circumvent the IT team by turning to more agile external cloud services providers (CSPs) to meet these demands. Relying on CSPs, or so-called shadow IT, doesn t address the long-term underlying technology weakness: The company s infrastructure lacks the agility to meet the skyrocketing demands of the business. The Need for Speed IT s response time depends on its ability to provision or allocate compute and storage resources quickly, in a matter of minutes, without disrupting ongoing DevOps projects or critical production applications. Given that each database requires copies for testing, development or analytics, DBAs face challenges on multiple fronts. These include: Ensuring that the database itself is tuned and optimized for consistent and predictable performance. Monitoring the infrastructure supporting critical apps, databases and development teams. Maintaining continuous application availability for external and internal customers. Advantages of a Converged Infrastructure In many large IT organizations, some teams manage servers and storage resources, while others support applications and DevOps teams. With legacy hardware systems, it can take days, or even weeks, to allocate storage, create a virtual machine or new database instance, and provision network and compute resources across these organizational silos in today s real-time marketplace. Converged infrastructure solutions provide pre-integrated and pre-tested systems that combine storage, compute and networking to reduce time spent on integration and tuning, and to accelerate time to production. Converged infrastructure solutions can help eliminate operational silos to enable DBAs, DevOps teams and application owners to quickly access a shared, but secure, pool of resources, as needed.
The advantages of converged infrastructure solutions include: Faster time to production for new applications and DevOps projects. More efficient use of IT staff. Improved and faster ROI from IT infrastructure. Converged infrastructure solutions help eliminate these operational silos so DBAs, DevOps teams and application owners can quickly access a shared, but secure, pool of resources.
2 Continuous Availability If a critical business application such as an ERP or inventory management system crashes and can t be recovered quickly, it disrupts all lines of business. And if a customer-facing web-based application is unavailable or simply slow to respond, customers may take their business to a competitor. The key to enabling continuous availability is an Oracle database infrastructure that is engineered for continuous operations, delivers predictable performance as demand scales, and above all else is flexible and resilient.
Recommendations Eliminate Data Protection Risks There are technology solutions designed to help maximize data protection and accelerate operational recovery of Oracle databases. The luxury of having a true backup window is no longer realistic for most enterprises, especially when trying to protect the entire Oracle database. Narrowing the backup window by running faster, smaller backups reduces data-access delays. This approach also minimizes the risk that changes won t be captured in the event of an outage. Traditional data-protection methods, in which full databases or data sets are copied from a physical server to a backup location, tie up memory and network resources, and are simply not fast enough to satisfy demands. A better approach is to minimize the amount of data that needs protection. Object storage can significantly reduce the size of data sets that need to be protected, saving storage capacity, network bandwidth and staff resources. Other benefits include the ability to: Unify data protection to reduce complexity, cost and risk of loss. Modernize data protection with a business-defined policy engine to create optimal workflows. Cut infrastructure costs by shrinking backup data sets via snapshot, deduplication and archiving functions.
Recommendations Space-efficient snapshots and clones create application-consistent copies of critical data that greatly reduce backup sets and simplify data protection. Because the snapshot captures only changed data, the volume of storage required for each copy is smaller than the source, making it possible to carry out shorter, more frequent backups that go unnoticed by users. Automate Data Recovery The ability to rapidly restore data in the event of an unplanned outage is essential to delivering web-scale availability to customers. Look for solutions that are sophisticated enough to match data protection and recovery to service-level requirements, yet still reduce complexity and cost through the orchestration and automation of backup and recovery. Object storage can significantly reduce the size of data sets that need to be protected, saving storage capacity, network bandwidth and staff resources.
3 Resource Constraints IT budgets are tight or shrinking, so IT teams and DBAs must do more with less staff and fewer resources, and achieve higher ROI with what remains. When it comes to deploying and supporting enterprise applications, the pressure is high to both keep costs down and deliver differentiated solutions and services ahead of Cost the competition. Number of CPUs
Recommendations Consolidate and Optimize Storage and Compute Our experience reveals that customers typically utilize only 30% to 40% of the hardware infrastructure (e.g., storage, compute and networking) that supports most enterprise Oracle databases and applications. This means that hardware and software solutions that have already been paid for are sitting idle, with up to 70% of their potential capacity going to waste. It is important to use the right tools to analyze current infrastructure utilization, as well as database and performance requirements. Once you have identified idle or underutilized storage and compute resources and optimized database performance, you can much more easily plan and execute consolidation efforts. This is the quickest and most direct way to reduce database infrastructure total cost of ownership (TCO), while improving and maximizing a limited budget for existing IT investments. Forrester concluded that Hitachi Unified Compute Platform for Oracle Database produced, on average, these financial benefits: ROI: 103% Payback: 2.1 months Net Present Value: $6.6 million * Hitachi Data Systems commissioned this study. Interviews were conducted with select customers.
Recommendations Virtualize Storage Selecting the right storage or converged infrastructure solution for your Oracle database plays a major role in cost containment. Virtualizing storage to create large pools available across the business reduces time spent provisioning new capacity for growing databases or DevOps projects. In addition, virtualized storage helps eliminate silos that make it difficult for users to have a complete view of business information, accelerating the path from data to insight. Automated storage tiering can further reduce costs while maximizing performance, ensuring that the most active, valuable data sets or database tables are on the fastest storage, such as flash. Less critical data or infrequently accessed tables can be stored on more economical media, such as serial attached SCSI (SAS) drives. Automating these processes with a converged infrastructure solution can help administrators configure, provision and manage an Oracle ecosystem more quickly, easily and cost-effectively.
Unlock the Power of Enterprise Data With Converged Solutions for Oracle Databases The growth in enterprise applications Limited agility continues to put pressure on Oracle DBAs and infrastructure teams to optimize speed, availability, agility and cost reduction all at once. DBAs and the business can meet these demands by drawing on a suite of converged storage and compute solutions, as well as professional services delivered by Oracle experts at Hitachi Data Systems. As a result, IT teams can confidently pursue new opportunities knowing that they won t sacrifice performance or reliability. Continuous availability Unified Solution Resource constraints
Take the First Step Toward Optimizing Your Database Infrastructure s ROI If your business runs on Oracle databases, you need the highest performance, uncompromising availability and lowest TCO you can get, while still achieving your business goals. The first step to getting more out of your Oracle infrastructure is to understand its current state. Is it designed to deliver the performance, resilience and agility your business needs? Are you getting the most from your investment? Our Hitachi Database Infrastructure Evaluation Tool (DIET) can quickly analyze your Oracle database and identify performance bottlenecks and underutilized resources. DIET provides tailored recommendations to help you get the most out of your database, critical apps and supporting infrastructure. Try DIET for free. Hitachi Oracle Database Experts As an Oracle Diamond partner with more than 20 years of experience working on the most demanding and dynamic Oracle environments, Hitachi Data Systems can develop a performance and utilization baseline, and diagnose and address database configuration issues for your IT organization. Our experts can assist you, whether you use our suite of converged, storage and compute solutions or those of other providers. Learn more! Corporate Headquarters 2845 Lafayette Street Santa Clara, CA 96050-2639 USA www.hds.com community.hds.com Regional Contact Information Americas: +1 866 374 5822 or info@hds.com Europe, Middle East and Africa: +44 (0) 1753 618000 or info.emea@hds.com Asia Pacific: +852 31897900 or hds.marketing.apac@hds.com Hitachi Data Systems Corporation 2016. All rights reserved. HITACHI is a trademark or registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners. CM-002-A March 2016