WIkibon Cofounder and CTO David Floyer

Leading IT shops are cutting the cost of running their large Oracle Red Stacks by 40-50 percent by using a combination of converged systems, Oracle best practices, and flash storage, writes WIkibon Cofounder and CTO David Floyer in “Duplicating Public Cloud Economics for Oracle DBAs”. This rivals operating cost savings companies achieve by moving systems to public cloud platforms such as AWS, while retaining control of their data, service levels and cost structure.

These calculations are based on a series of recent interviews with Wikibon community members who have adopted highly converged infrastructures for running Oracle systems, along with other research. Based on this research, Wikibon calculates that IT executives can expect savings of 40% to 50% in costs or equivalent value by adopting what amounts to an on-premise IaaS based on converged infrastructure with the minimum number of SKUs, even after taking into account the higher costs of highly converged solutions.

By comparison, a recent series of in-depth interviews with Wikibon members in organizations of all sizes in both the private enterprise and government sectors that are using public cloud sectors showed that they can realize similar size savings. However, they often had to make a significant investment in management time to adjust operations to the new ways of providing IT. This included handling significant resistance from lines-of-business with compliance and data security concerns as well as managing reassignments and reorganizations within the IT department.

Larger strategic opportunities

However, Floyer writes, the savings is only part of the picture, and internal versus external cloud services is not an either-or choice but rather a matter of selecting the right tool for each part of the architecture. Highly converged infrastructure can be a tool for strategic support of radical business change by providing a practical solution for combining internal and external data with algorithmic components to create radical new ways of doing business. A viable long-term strategy to support this goal, and moving the business into the 21st Century, he writes, “is determining the physical and logical deployment topology of private, highly converged infrastructure, public cloud services and external data cloud sources.”

As part of this overall strategy, adapting highly converged infrastructure for the internal Oracle Red Stack can free Oracle DBAs from lower-level tasks to spend significant time on higher value, more strategic activities. Assisting application development, he writes, is the activity that the DBAs themselves consider the most valuable contribution they can provide. Wikibon analysis shows that converged infrastructure including the database contributes up to 45% improvement in DBA productivity. Virtualization adds 19%; flash and memory optimization add an additional 13% toward a 75% total potential DBA productivity improvement. This allows CIOs to reassign their Oracle DBAs to higher level tasks such as assisting in application development, he writes. Or they can choose to reduce DBA costs.

Like all Wikibon research, David’s full report on this, the first in a series he plans on similar issues based on interviews with Wikibon community members, is available without charge on the Wikibon Web site. IT professionals are invited to register for membership in the Wikibon community, which allows them to participate in research projects such as this one and to post their own comments and questions, Professional Alerts and white papers, on relevant topics on the site.

Impact of Oracle Best Practice chart copyright Wikibon.org 2014.