Rethinking Database Infrastructure Investments

CIOs are rethinking their database investments. They want to utilize the benefits of cloud computing and understand their company’s data to drive future success. However, databases only perform as well as the systems they run on.

There are three key challenges that CIOs need to address to reduce their total cost of ownership and risks without compromising availability and database performance: simplified infrastructure, aggregation of data and deployment agility.

Simplifying and Optimizing Infrastructure – Designing a system to power a true high performance database requires a solution that offers extreme performance, seamless interoperability and fine-tuning parameters to help streamline operations. The engineering resources and expertise required to design such a system are generally unavailable to all organizations.

The requirements start with the need to exploit integrated compute, network, storage and virtualization capabilities. These capabilities must strike a balance between standardization and customization as well as accommodate for retiring and/or supporting legacy applications – which are both tall orders for enterprise companies. Further, the architecture must be built with enough agility to withstand data consumed by multiple constituents. This requires an architecture that can support continuous operations for mobility, high availability and enterprise-class integrated data protection solutions.

Aggregation of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) – Siloed applications and databases that sit on top of cobbled infrastructures are a thing of the past. In its place are interlinks to applications and databases that need to support exponential growth – an operational model that drives customer demand.

Today website technology often follows how consumers navigate and make choices based on brand and price. Similar to how Amazon mines shopper patterns to build a consumer profile for featuring relevant products, IT organizations can aggregate data from valuable analytics tools, such as IBM Hyperion and Oracle Exalytics. Commonly called ‘business intelligence,’ organizations demand this technology at their fingertips to perform the real-time analysis required to maintain competitive advantage. This level of business intelligence can be achieved when IT organizations first leverage best-of-breed technologies and support mixed workloads – all of which drive greater consolidation ratios that result in higher utilization of resources.

Agility in Leveraging Innovative Technology and Data – Picture a tax application on the Sunday before tax day. Its infrastructure needs to be available 24×7 to process massive volumes of tax filings for its clients – commonly called Online Transaction Processing (OLTP). The characteristics of these mission-critical databases are high performance in the millions of IOPS, high throughput and millisecond response times or latency. Further, the ability to quickly deploy an infrastructure to support business needs or move an infrastructure from QA/test to production are all key to turning a company’s data into an analytical asset.

A converged infrastructure system converts these challenges into opportunities by integrating compute, network, storage and virtualization into a single system that is architected, tested and validated for such demanding workloads. It is designed from the ground up to support mixed workloads – databases and applications. VCE’s database solutions deliver best-in-class technology, leading-edge innovation and unparalleled customer experience for massive database environments such as Oracle. The end result is an infrastructure that can be deployed with agility and simplified operations, providing better database performance, higher availability and lower total cost of ownership.

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About the Author: Lakshmi Pedda