Consolidating Oracle Databases on Private Grids

I've enjoyed the Oracle Red Room blog for some time now so I'm pleased to be finally making a contribution of my own. I'm Roland Slee and after 17 years in sales at Oracle I've recently become the senior representative for Oracle's Database Development organisation in Asia Pacific & Japan. You can learn more about what I do by listening to the podcast below.

I've spent the past two days at the Gartner Infrastructure, Operations and Data Centre Conference in Sydney. The conference themes were "Cloudy, Green and Virtualised". It was an excellent event and I thoroughly enjoyed my discussions there with Gartner analysts including John Roberts, Phil Sargeant and Errol Rasit. I gave a presentation on consolidating Oracle Databases onto shared grids and participated in a vendor panel with Phil Davis from Dell and Gordon Makryllos from APC.

Much of the talk at the conference was focused on virtualisation and cloud computing, topics that remain somewhat theoretical for many customers, so I was keen to offer some very practical ways that customers can adopt an agile, virtualised infrastructure to run their Oracle Databases.

I described in my presentation the way an Australian customer has consolidated more than 300 Oracle Databases onto three database grids, significantly lifting the quality of service for their Oracle systems while also improving DBA productivity and saving money. Oracle Database workloads are found in nearly every enterprise data centre. The Oracle Database is a workload that lends itself to consolidation and virtualisation because Oracle Real Application Clusters allows Oracle Databases workloads to be migrated from scale-up environments to scale-out ones, usually without change to business applications.

The Sun Oracle Database Machine makes this style of consolidation even more attractive because it offers a pre-built, pre-optimised "private cloud" configuration that is ideal for database consolidation as it offers extraordinary performance, availability and agility through its ability to leverage industry standard servers and storage in a transparent, scale-out architecture.

Here's the presentation:

Implementing Private Database Clouds

Here's a podcast that summarises the key messages.

So if you're running multiple Oracle Databases on dedicated, scale-up infrastructure then there are great savings to be had by consolidating your database workloads onto a low-cost, agile grid. The Sun Oracle Database Machine is an ideal platform for such a consolidation.