The Zero Dataloss Myth

In previous posts I have focused on the technical side of running business applications (except my last post about the Joint Escalation Center). So let’s teleport to another level and have a look at business drivers.

What happens if you are an IT architect for an organization, and you ask your business people (your internal customers) how much data loss they can tolerate in case of a disaster? I bet the answer is always the same:

“zero!”

This relates to what is known in the industry as Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

Ask them how much downtime they can tolerate in case something bad happens. Again, the consistent answer:

“none!”

This is equivalent to Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

Now if you are in “Jukebox mode” (business asks, you provide, no questions asked) then you try to give them what they ask for (RPO = zero, RTO = zero). Which makes many IT vendors and communication service providers happy, because this means you have to run expensive clustering software, and synchronous data mirroring to a D/R site using pricey data connections.

If you are in “Consultative” mode, you try to figure out what the business really wants, not just what they ask for. And you wonder if their request is feasible at all, and if so, what the cost is of achieving these service levels.

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The EMC Oracle Joint Escalation Center

Oracle & EMCEMC and Oracle have supported each others products since 1995 and both spent millions of dollars in making them work together. EMC actually became famous in the late nineties because of our “Guilty until proven innocent” support mentality. We are known for the first company to give meaning to the concept of “Remote Support / Phone Home”, and the success stories still go around that EMC field engineers sometimes surprised customers with a visit in order to repair components (mostly disk drives), often before they were broken, and if they were actually broken the customers would not even notice (needless to say that replacements were done online).

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Stop Idling – Start Saving

One of my missions is to help customers saving money (Dirty Cache Cash). So considering the average enterprise application environment, I frequently ask them where they spend most of their IT budget on. Is it servers? Networks? Middleware? Applications?

Turns out that if you look at the operating cost of an Oracle database application, a very big portion of the TCO is in database licenses. Note that I focus on Oracle (that’s my job) but for other databases the cost ratio might be similar. Or not. But it makes sense to look at Oracle as that is the most common platform for mission-critical applications. So let’s look at a database environment and forget about the application for now.
Let’s say that 50% of the operating cost of a database server is spent on Oracle licensing and maintenance (and I guess that’s not that far off). Now if we can help saving 10% on licensing (for example, by providing fast and efficient infrastructure), would that justify more expensive, but faster and more efficient infrastructure? I guess so.

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Thank you, Larry Ellison

My colleague Vince Westin published this great post on his blog:

During his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, Larry Ellison launched the new Exadata X3.
LarryOOW2012 The new version appears to have some nice new capabilities, including caching writes to EFD, which are likely to improve the usability of Exadata for OLTP workloads. And he was nice enough to include the EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K in detail on 30% of his slides as he announced the new Exadata. And for that, I give thanks. I am sure that Salesforce.com were similarly thankful when Larry focused so much of his time on their product in his keynote last year.

Read the rest of his post here.

The post provides a bunch of good reasons why EMC VMAX might be a better choice for customers that run high-performance mission-critical environments. A highly recommended read!

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