Converged systems, flash storage, virtualization and other best practices can reduce the net costs of a typical Oracle system by 41 percent, writes Wikibon Cofounder and CTO David Floyer in his latest Wikibon report, “Duplicating Public Cloud Economics for Oracle Database Infrastructure”. However, achieving maximum benefit from this best practice architecture requires reorganizing the IT organization away from traditional silos to a Dev/Ops model.

By moving to a single SME that includes converged hardware, middleware, OS and Oracle pre-installed and optimized, IT cuts the total lifetime cost of the stack by 80%. Moving to a “flash-first” strategy for storage and optimizing the hardware overall for the database allows IT to reduce the number of processor cores required for an average large Oracle database from 192 to 120. While flash adds some cost to the hardware, this is far outweighed by the reduction in Oracle licensing fees, which Floyer estimates at $1.4 million for his typical Oracle installation over three years.

Reorganization

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Another major savings, not included in his formal study but discussed in general in the report, is the reduction in DBAs required to run the SME. Floyer quotes one Wikibon member as saying “All the patching is now automatic. I have one DBA now. If I were doing this on the old platform environment I would have to have six.”

However, staff cost savings can be much larger than just reduction of DBAs required to run the Oracle database. The virtualized single SME approach, if maximized across the data center, mandates the breakdown of the traditional IT silos, since storage, server, network, etc., are now managed as a single unit rather than as separate entities. While Wikibon hs concentrated on Oracle in this study because it is a major component of most corporate infrastructures, the single SME/flash storage/virtualization combination can provide compelling cost, simplification, and flexibility benefits across the data center. Floyer writes that the most common structure for the reorganized ITO among the Wikibon members interviewed is Dev/Ops.

Wikibon expects that over time increasing amounts of SMEs will migrate to the cloud, as IaaS and PaaS providers including Amazon extend their stacks into the database layer, and Dev/Ops will become Cloud/Ops. The advantage for CIOs is that they will provide the lowest lifetime cost for the entire SME.

As with all Wikibon research, this report is available without charge on the Wikibon Web site. IT professionals are encouraged to register for membership in the Wikibon community, which allows them to connect with peers, participate in Wikibon research, comment on published research, and publish their own questions, tips, Professional Alerts and longer research.