Getting More out of Oracle With Hyperconverged Infrastructure WHITE PAPER When it comes to enterprise databases, there is no bigger player than Oracle. For more than three decades, Oracle has been synonymous with heavy-duty workloads and sophisticated database functionality. The massive growth in enterprise data has only accentuated the importance of Oracle, which still claims nearly half of all annual database sales. Add in the fact that Oracle is tightly linked to such popular enterprise applications as PeopleSoft and Siebel, and is deployed in heterogeneous operating environments such as Unix, Linux, Windows and proprietary mainframes, and it s easy to see why Oracle is such a data center linchpin. But the growing size, complexity and value of Oracle databases and the applications linked to Oracle services have created significant pressures for database administrators (DBAs). Whether it s keeping up with backbreaking performance requirements for OLTP and other workloads, ensuring high availability in a 24/7/365 business environment or reducing the costs of Oracle s CPU-based licensing, IT professionals and DBAs are under the gun to make their Oracle environment more efficient and facile. A TECHTARGET WHITE PAPER
Getting More out of Oracle With Hyperconverged Infrastructure To its credit, Oracle has always understood the importance of pairing its enterprise databases with sophisticated, high-powered infrastructure; that appreciation is widely considered a driving force for Oracle s 2010 acquisition of hardware giant Sun Microsystems. But siloed, legacy infrastructure, which has usually been the underpinning for Oracle databases, no longer can keep up with demanding performance, data protection and management expectations for Oracle. To help DBAs cope with increasingly complex and demanding Oracle use cases, many organizations are moving toward more efficient and flexible infrastructure options, particularly hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Unlike legacy data center solutions, HCI provides a unique combination of modernized, tightly integrated hardware components and centralized management, globally. This makes hyperconvergence a great fit for virtualized workloads, which is happening with increased frequency for Tier 1 applications like Oracle. Additionally, HCI solutions with the greatest functionality and the best alignment with enterprise databases like Oracle include built-in data protection an important differentiator in the crowded field of HCI solutions providers. For Oracle shops, HCI represents more than just improved cost efficiency and easier management. It also represents a new philosophy for enabling the full capabilities of an essential enterprise software platform within the confines of tight budgets, limited IT resources and increasingly complexity. Why HCI is an Ideal Fit for Oracle As Oracle workloads become more demanding and more complex, it also becomes more challenging for DBAs and IT administrators to keep up with the many challenges associated with Oracle environments. These include voluminous data growth, escalating workload performance requirements, demanding service-level agreements (SLAs), ensuring high availability, supporting growing demands for virtualization and, of course, keeping Capex and Opex under control. Enterprises also face the reality of an increasingly difficult set of management challenges associated with traditional infrastructure stacks, which historically have been the default architecture for data centers running Oracle. Finally, Oracle DBAs and IT organizations have to grapple with issues such as provisioning, updating and managing test/development and production environments more efficiently. Simply put, as organizations become increasingly dependent on their Oracle databases, there is greater urgency to ensure that the underlying infrastructure is easy to deploy, manage and scale, while also delivering enterprise-class protection and resiliency. As organizations have increasingly virtualized their Oracle workloads, hyperconvergence has been seen as an efficient way to accomplish those goals. As Oracle databases are called on to store more data, scale on a moment s notice and avoid runaway Capex costs, many organizations have turned to virtualization to address these issues. Some hyperconverged solutions although not all of them use a VM-centric architecture that helps to break down infrastructure silos, speed deployment and facilitate scalability. PG. 2
WHITE PAPER By creating a single, shared resource pool, hyperconverged solutions abstract VMs and applications from the hardware foundation across all components. This pool of resources doesn t just include server, storage and networking; it also integrates compute, storage (hard disk drive and flash), backup, disaster recovery, WAN optimization and cloud gateways. Since hyperconvergence is typically implemented in a pre-tested, all-in-one appliance, deployment is much faster and less expensive than with traditional infrastructure stacks. It also is a big upgrade over earliergeneration converged solutions that often integrated certain components such as storage and compute but excluded other components such as deduplication, data protection and a unified management approach. This approach to hyperconvergence provides all of the above, while speeding deployment, reducing management complexity and improving scalability over first-generation converged solutions. What to Look For in an HCI Solution for Oracle Of course, it is important to understand exactly what true hyperconvergence means. As hyperconvergence becomes more and more popular, many suppliers have stretched the definitional boundaries of what their hyperconverged solutions really can do in order to capitalize on growing interest in the segment. Making the right choice of hyperconverged solutions requires attention to detail on functionality and capabilities, especially given the mission-critical nature of Oracle applications and workloads. You should look for a hyperconverged solution that includes: Integration of all major hardware components under the hypervisor: compute, storage and networking. This is an important requirement that many advertised hyperconverged solutions don t meet. Many of those solutions only create integrated storage pools, or perhaps converge storage into a low-profile server appliance. Solutions that don t integrate all hardware components not only end up adding Capex, but also are much harder to manage. Additionally, some hyperconverged solutions really are just reference architectures that, although helpful for organizations looking to migrate away from legacy infrastructure stacks, require do-it-yourself assembly, test and deployment. Centralized, VM-centric management. Oracle DBAs and infrastructure managers are under the gun to do more with less, and the VM paradigm helps do that. A centralized approach, with a single pane of glass available globally, takes significant time and effort out of infrastructure management, freeing DBAs and other IT staff to work on transformative projects rather than on maintaining and manually tuning systems. Built-in data protection. The essential nature of Oracle databases means data protection is more important than ever, but it also must be done without adding cost and management complexity with add-on data protection appliances and third-party backup software packages. Adequate and reliable recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPO and RTO) are necessary to ensure that demanding service level agreements are met. PG. 3 Inline deduplication, compression, optimization, and instant clones. These capabilities are big wins for Oracle DBAs in DevOps, where the ability to instantaneously clone huge, multi-terabyte databases within or between data centers with zero impact on performance is a godsend. Such
Getting More out of Oracle With Hyperconverged Infrastructure data efficiency technologies allow for the most efficient use of resources across all phases of the data lifecycle while simultaneously increasing application performance. Software-centric design. True hyperconvergence is more than just a bunch of hardware components integrated into an appliance form factor. Using software-defined architecture precepts, hyperconvergence improves performance by reducing many processing requirements normally carried out by servers and storage systems. This reduces latency and IOPS, which is an essential requirement for mainstay Oracle workloads such as OLTP, business intelligence and big data. SimpliVity HCI Solutions for Oracle The supplier that not only meets all the criteria for true hyperconvergence, but also delivers solutions optimized for Oracle environments, is SimpliVity. The company has carved out a strong place in the market as a reliable, innovative supplier of next-generation hyperconvergence that plays well in performanceintensive, complex and high-scale environments such as Oracle. Independent research indicates that nearly one in five SimpliVity users are running or planning to run Oracle. 1 SimpliVity offers two families of hyperconverged solutions with a multiplatform approach. The OmniCube brand of solution utilizes enterprise-grade, white-labeled servers, while the OmniStack models are powered by x86 servers of the customers choice from either Cisco or Lenovo. Both OmniCube and OmniStack solutions consolidate all IT infrastructure below the hypervisor in a highly scalable 2U building-block optimized for VM environments, using an all-in-one design that speeds and simplifies out-of-the-box deployment and time to value. The SimpliVity solutions natively integrate 8 to 12 data center components, including compute, storage, deduplication appliances, backup software, replication, WAN optimization and cloud gateways. A key to SimpliVity s ability to support Oracle-class performance and scalability is the OmniStack Accelerator Card, which handles compression, inline deduplication, and data optimization at ingest across all phases of the data lifecycle. As a result, SimpliVity is able to deliver to its customers a median data efficiency of 40:1, although third-party research indicates that a third of respondents experienced at least 100:1 data efficiency, and half of respondents saw performance improvements of at least 50%. 2 One of the key competitive differentiators of the SimpliVity solutions is the OmniStack Data Virtualization Platform, which runs as a virtual controller on VMware s vsphere ESXi. It abstracts data from the underlying hardware, and handles policy management at the VM level to ease management and promote VM mobility. The OmniStack Data Virtualization Platform improves performance with compression, inline deduplication and data optimization, and its VM-centric global unified management console supports enhanced scale-out capabilities and the ability to back up, restore, clone, and move local and remote VMs and associated data with a single click. SimpliVity builds on, and extends, the management capabilities of Oracle s Automatic Storage Management framework by increasing the visibility between infrastructure administrators and DBAs. PG. 4 1 TechValidate Research on SimpliVity OmniCube, TechValidate, July 2015 2 TechValidate, Ibid.
WHITE PAPER Built-in data protection is another key feature for SimpliVity hyperconverged appliances. SimpliVity executes full logical backups at the VM level, which improves deduplication and compression rates. SimpliVity backups are fast and reliable, and do not impact production workloads or user productivity. Furthermore, with builtin data protection, SimpliVity eliminates the need to purchase and integrate third party backup applications and appliances, saving on both Capex and Opex. Compared with competing hyperconverged solutions, SimpliVity offers numerous benefits for Oracle environments: All management is done at the VM level, without the complexity of LUNs and SAN concepts. Built-in VM backup, multi-site replication and disaster recovery. Enhanced resiliency delivered through intra-node RAID6 capability, which can tolerate double hard drive failures on each node. For Oracle shops utilizing the platform in DevOps use cases, SimpliVity s hyperconverged solutions deliver the necessary performance and availability without the complexity and cost normally seen in Oracle environments running on converged or legacy infrastructure. For instance, in order to service I/O-intensive workloads like DevOps, it often is recommended that dedicated data stores be created. SimpliVity s VMcentric, global unified management framework allows DBAs to manage VMs, rather than individual data stores (or LUNs in a physical environment). Conclusion Oracle s imposing presence in enterprise data centers is undeniable. Organizations have invested significant amounts of money, IT talent and resources to get the most out of their Oracle databases and related applications. But even an enterprise-class relational database like Oracle can only do so much with traditional infrastructure stacks that result in inefficient silos that are difficult and expensive to manage. To make infrastructure easier to manage, while also reducing Capex and Opex, many Oracle shops are embracing hyperconverged infrastructure for even their most performance-intensive workloads like OLTP, big data and data warehousing. True hyperconverged infrastructure combining globally unified VM-centric management, data efficiency and built-in data protection helps DBAs and IT administrators deliver the performance, resiliency and availability necessary to meet demanding SLAs. SimpliVity s hyperconverged infrastructure is optimized for Oracle environments to support Tier 1 workloads in the most cost-efficient and manageable manner. The OmniStack Data Virtualization Platform provides a VM-centric management framework that simplifies complex and resource-intensive functions often resident within Oracle environments. SimpliVity s hyperconverged infrastructure offers the level of performance DBAs have come to expect from Oracle by delivering inline deduplication, compression and data optimization that mitigates latency, even when large numbers of users are concurrently accessing the database. For more information about SimpliVity s hyperconverged solutions for Oracle environments, go to: https://www.simplivity.com/wp-content/uploads/oracle_solution_brief.pdf. PG. 5