Planning Database Hardware Upgrade !!! Consider Oracle Exadata

Upgrading database hardware in an organization is always a cumbersome process. The most time consuming step is, planing for the upgrade, which mainly includes choosing right hardware for your Oracle databases. After deciding on the hardware type for your databases, rest will be taken care by technical teams involved. I will be discussing, how I reached to the conclusion of implementing Exadata in my organization.

I am dealing with multiple hardware vendors(HP, IBM, Dell etc.) and different type of bare metal servers(Rack mounted, blade machines etc.). Also to add on, I do have virtualization for some databases. Most of the servers are old, and needs to be replaced. The reason was, we started to face issues like server end of life, frequent hardware failures, performance degradation etc. To start with the hardware upgrade process, I checked multiple solutions from different vendors like, HP Converged Systems, Oracle SuperCluster, all blade environment(quarter/half/full height), all virtualized  environment(Hyper-v, VMware, Oracle VM), Oracle Exadata, EMC v-Block etc.

I had to decide on the best solution based on TCO(Total Cost of Ownership) and annual maintenance cost. A significant time is spent analyzing and comparing all these solutions. After completing four months extensive study on financial impact and overall hardware performance, Exadata comes out to be the best of all because of following main reasons:

  • It reduced the space required for database servers in DataCenter. I will be removing at least four racks in my DataCenter with Exadata implementation.
  • Eliminate external SAN storage need for databases which save huge amount of money.
  • SAN switches( Cisco MDS etc.) not required for server to SAN connectivity. This is usually a hidden component in DataCenters which consumes a lot of money and is often a bottleneck for database I/Os if not configured properly.
  • Its COD feature(Introduce from X5-2) saves a lot of money if the resource requirement is less.
  • Licensing cost of Oracle Databases will be reduced as new DBs can be added without any additional cost.
  • Its Storage Software which will process the business logic and return the processed results to compute nodes. It completely changes the traditional processing of queries and move the query processing to storage servers.

The above mentioned reasons are only a few, there are many more benefits and new features which I will be discussing in my future posts for exadata.

If you are deciding to revamp your data-center for hosting databases, it is good to consider Oracle Exadata.