Converged infrastructure boosts DBA productivity, according to a new Wikibon report. Wikibon’s research examined Oracle database administrators (DBAs) in particular and found that highly converged infrastructure lowered costs and raised productivity between 40 and 50 percent.

Perhaps the most interesting nugget of knowledge that the Wikibon report uncovered is that the method of delivery matters much less than the overall transformation of the way in which a company does business as a result of converged infrastructure. The advantage of Converged infrastructure is less about operational savings and more about finding ways to merge low-cost data in innovative ways.

Wikibon’s research focused on improving DBA productivity based on Oracle best practice methodologies, largely due to Oracle’s widespread use by numerous businesses that rely on it for business critical applications. The findings indicate that making use of Oracle best practices can double DBA productivity.

DBAs saved 50 percent of their time thanks to assisting application development, which refers to those activities that DBAs determined to be the most valuable. Under normal circumstances, a DBA would label only 5 percent as assisting AD. The research demonstrated that the more of a stack that is included in converged infrastructure, the better productivity DBAs will get out of it. Inclusion of the entire stack in a single managed entity (SME) effectively reduces enterprise costs in cloud and on-premise integrated models.

It should be no surprise that many of the leading converged infrastructure vendors (HP Enterprise Database Consolidation Appliance, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM PureApplication, etc.) include at least three of the top four contributors to productivity improvement. Database convergence accounts for 25 percent, while infrastructure convergence (20 percent), virtualization (19 percent) and flash and memory optimization (13 percent) combined with it to account for over 75 percent of total DBA productivity improvement.

The results are clear. The more effort a company puts into highly converged infrastructure, the lower its costs will be, sometimes as much as a 50 percent reduction. Wikibon recommends that CIOs act on this information and move to adopt converged infrastructure, regardless of the method of delivery (from hardware vendors, public cloud service providers or application ISVs). For the complete report, including helpful graphical data, visit Wikibon.org.