MEA: Defining Capacity and Performance Metrics

In the previous post, we discussed the current state of many existing Oracle environments. Now we need a method to accurately measure or define the workload characteristics of a given database platform.

In our customer engagements we frequently ask details about databases, for example, “How much CPU power does the database require”, “how large is your production database”, “How much bandwidth is needed”.

As an illustration, let’s say that the answer to the database size question is: 5 Terabytes.

What do we know at this point? We have a rough idea but still a lot of missing pieces of the puzzle.

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Maximum Efficiency Architecture: Current State

In the previous post, I announced Maximum Efficiency Architecture – a methodology for achieving optimal cost-efficiency for (Oracle) databases whilst also maintaining (or even improving) business service levels. In this post we will review the current state of typical database landscapes.

From our conversations with many customers as well as looking at their performance data, we come to the following findings and conclusions.

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Reducing Oracle TCO: Maximum Efficiency Architecture

IOUG Survey
Last year, Dell EMC sponsored the 2020 IOUG Database Priorities Survey. One of the questions was, “What leading factors do you weigh when selecting infrastructure for your Oracle environment?”

The number 1 factor respondents mentioned, was “Cost”. This confirms my own experiences when talking to our customers. High cost is often the main decision factor, followed closely by performance (#2) and a number of other factors, most of which I tend to categorize under the umbrella term “IT Operations”. As you may know from reading some of my other blogposts, I am passionate about achieving maximum efficiency for business applications – which is also the reason for choosing the name of this blog (Dirty Cache) since 2011. (more…)

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Oracle on VMware – The Final Frontier

Final FrontierA question I tend to ask my customers almost always is what their current state is regarding IT transformation and journey to the cloud. Of course such a strategy does not work very well on bare metal and some kind of isolation between services and physical hardware is required – which naturally includes virtualization, as well as the use of some kind of container technology, as-a-Service paradigms, changes in IT administration and operations etc.

Nearly always the answer includes “We already virtualized everything! … Well, ehm, except Oracle….”

TL;DR: There are no more roadblocks for virtualizing Oracle, including license issues. See the last section “Mythbusting” of this post for a summary on myths and truths.

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