This document provides an overview of the Oracle Database Appliance. It discusses how the appliance provides a complete, simple, reliable and affordable high availability database solution in a single preconfigured system. It highlights key features such as automated deployment and management, high performance flash storage, support for database consolidation, and affordable capacity-based licensing. Example deployments by various organizations are also summarized to demonstrate benefits such as reduced costs, improved performance, and simplified management.
In today’s networked and mobile business world, an every increasing number of services are considered business critical to their organizations, and each typically has an ever-growing data. Should database downtime of these applications occur, it often results in lost revenue, lost productivity, and loss of customer confidence. Unless you have the right technology, skills, and resources, protecting databases from downtime can be risky and error-prone.
Building highly available systems is difficult, complex
Requires advanced integration skills many organizations don’t have
Risky and error-prone with no vendor accountability
Staying with status quo often not an answer
Aging database infrastructure and limited IT budgets impacts application performance and availability
Data that was once not considered business critical often has become so, yet the supporting infrastructure doesn’t support it that way
Rapid data growth has lead to an inefficient use of computing resources, often resulting in many small, disparate databases
ODA is a complete, simple, reliable and affordable solution for running highly available databases and applications.
ODA is a member of Oracle’s engineered systems product family and the software and hardware are engineered together (we’ll talk more about the advantages of Engineered Systems in more detail in a later slide.
ODA is complete: software, server, networking, and storage
ODA is an appliance that is easy to get up and running, saving customers time and effort not only at the initial installation, but throughout the life of the product (enabled by quarterly patch management of the entire stack and automation via the ODA Appliance Manager)
ODA is reliable. The hardware and software are engineered together to ensure that the system is available and it does it transparently.
ODA is affordable. You can license a subset of the CPU cores and grow your usage as demand grows, enabling you to more effectively manage capital expenses.
ODA is a very successful, proven product with 1000’s of systems deployed worldwide across all market segments.
The are hundreds of ISV’s that have qualified their applications on ODA and are part of Oracle’s Exastack partner program, providing additional assurance to customers that their application perform on ODA.
The next two slides cover the two ways customers use the Oracle Database Appliance:
As a system to run their database
As a system to run their complete application (middleware, business logic, database)
As a Database Platform ODA can support:
OLTP workloads
Data Warehousing workloads
Some customer start with a single mission critical database that has been problematic: Could be because of availability issues or performance issues.
Most customers consolidate many databases onto a single ODA. They either start out with this in mind, or after they’ve used ODA for their most critical database workload they realize that ODA is an excellent platform for consolidating additional databases
Customer also use ODA as a test and development platform to speed development (reducing time to value) and reduce the costs of supporting lots of databases for test and development (cost of the time to create and manage many databases and the cost savings from not having to purchase lots of additional storage)
Oracle Database Appliance can also be used as a complete application platform
Hosting all tiers of an application on a single platform, in a compact, highly available platform
We call this a Solution-in-a-Box
Oracle applications include: JD Edwards, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Flexcube, Weblogic, Enterprise Manager and many more
ISV have also made their solutions available, including: IFS (Enterprise Resource Management: ERP), mFormation (mobile device management) and Temenos (Bank in a Box)
Customers can also deploy their internally developed applications
As we’ll discuss later in this presentation, it is easy to rapidly deploy not only HA enabled Databases, it is also easy to rapidly deploy all tiers of an application solution.
If the prospect is familiar with the X4-2 version, you can provide some details on the hardware enhancements:
1.5x more cores
Up to 3x more memory
4x more bandwidth (due to move to infiniband)
Added 1.6 TB of flash for database cache
3.5x more raw disk storage (the total raw storage with the expansion shelf is now 128 TB, greatly expanding number of databases that can be consolidated onto ODA)
Consolidation
ODA is a complete solution for both database and applications.
It contains everything you need in a single appliance (software, server, networking, storage)
Support for running applications on ODA (via virtualization) enables customers to save money from reduced footprint of one system versus several.
The Appliance Manager makes it easy to deploy complete applications.
Database and application platform
The Appliance Manager enables automated deployment of a highly available database and applications.
Automated patching of the quarterly updates saves customers lots of time both in qualifying the patches (done by Oracle for the whole system) and in applying the patches.
Look at all the complexity of building a solution from multiple vendors.
Lots of pieces to qualify and ensure that they work together and then need to be tuned together. Compare that to the integrated ODA solution.
Need to also consider all the various skills and coordination of people required to build a system from scratch compared to the simplicity of ODA. Many ODA’s are managed by the DBA, some also involve a server administrator, but in any case it is much simpler than building it yourself.
Finally the customer needs to live with the resulting solution. Getting a highly available systems up and running is one level of effort. The customer then needs to keep it running and patched appropriately. Patch qualification of patches from multiple vendors is a big effort and takes time and expertise. With ODA the entire system is patched 4 times a year. Much simpler and results in a more available system at lower cost.
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Simple
Rapid deployment addresses challenge #2: Gain ability to rapidly and cost-effectively build a clustered database environment
ODA has been engineered to be highly available, from the hardware to the software.
Disk drives can fail, a network connection can fail, a fan can fail, a complete server can fail, and the system will keep running.
Engineering this level of availability is a significant challenge to the build it yourself approach.
ODA’s engineered approach delivers a much better solution.
ODA customers can choose from three levels of software availability (the hardware is redundant and highly available).
The airplane analogy might help example the three levels.
Starting from the left and the most basic level is like flying a plane with one engine. They engine is very high quality, but if it fails the plane goes down. This corresponds to running ODA in the Single Instance configuration.
In the middle there are two engines on the plane, but one is turned off till needed. This is better and in most cases if the running engine fails, they standby can be started and take over the load. This corresponds to running ODA in the Active – Passive mode. If one server in ODA fails, the second server can be started and take over the load.
However the best solution is to have both engines on the plane running – sharing the load and eliminating the possibility that a standby engine might not start (or start in time). In the Active – Active configuration both servers in ODA are sharing the load and if one server goes down there is no interruption in service.
Simple
Rapid deployment addresses challenge #2: Gain ability to rapidly and cost-effectively build a clustered database environment
Reliable performance
The Oracle Database Appliance offers customers a unique capacity-on-demand licensing model to quickly scale from 4 to 72 processor cores without any hardware upgrades. Customers can deploy the Oracle Database Appliance with as few as 4 processors cores to run their database servers, and incrementally scale up to the maximum of 72 processor cores within the same hardware envelope. This avoids the usual costs and scheduled downtime of a typical hardware upgrade, and enables customers to deliver the performance and high availability that business users demand as they align software spending with business growth.
Reference for all but price: http://www.vce.com/asset/documents/vblock-100-gen2-3-architecture-overview.pdf
Price came from a PR call per competitive team.
the sources fro the $180k starting price of vblock bx100 came from the interviews vce gave to:
Zdnet: http://www.zdnet.com/article/vce-invites-mid-size-firms-to-the-vblock-party-with-latest-release/
Eweek: http://www.eweek.com/cloud/vce-scales-down-big-converged-systems-for-midrange-market/
Itjungle: http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh022513-story06.html
Comparable Dell Configuration:
2x R730 servers, each with
2x E52699 Intel CPU
2x 600GB mirrored system disks
256MB memory, expandable
6x 10GB Ethernet ports
4x SAS HBA
List Price for each: $26,890
2x MD1400 Storage Enclosures, Direct-attached SAS
2x 200GB write intensive SLC SSD
2x 400GB SLC SSD
8x 4TB 3.5” HDD
List Price for each: $23,956
2x Netgear ProSAFE Plus XS708E 10-Gigabit Ethernet Switch (XS708E-100NES)
8x 10GB ports
List Price for each: $1400
Total = 2x$26,890 + 2x$23,956 + 2x$1400 = $104,492
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You might have an established datacenter in one location, but have a need to stand up and operate additional remote sites.
There might be local country privacy regulations that require that customer data not leave that country, or you might setup a remote site to address latency concerns.
ODA is the perfect fit for remote deployments.
