Stop Idling – Start Saving

Bart Sjerps Oracle, Virtualization

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

Bart Sjerps General, Oracle

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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Oracle snapshots and clones with ZFS

Bart Sjerps FAQ, Oracle, Performance

Another Frequently Asked Question: Is there any disadvantage for a customer in using Oracle/SUN ZFS appliances to create database/application snapshots in comparison with EMC’s cloning/snapshot offerings?

Oracle marketing is pushing materials where they promote the ZFS storage appliance as the ultimate method for database cloning, especially when the source database is on Exadata. Essentially the idea is as follows: backup your primary DB to the ZFS appliance, then create snaps or clones off the backup for testing and development (more explanation in Oracle’s paper and video). Of course it is marketed as being much cheaper, easier and faster than using storage from an Enterprise Storage system such as those offered by EMC.

Oracle Youtube video

Oracle White paper

In order to understand the limitations of the ZFS appliance you need to know the fundamental workings of the ZFS filesystem. I recommend you look at the Wikipedia article on ZFS (here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS) and get familiar with its basic principles and features. The ZFS appliance is based on the same filesystem but due to it being an appliance, it’s a little bit different in behaviour.

So let’s see what a customer gets when he decides to go for the Sun appliance instead of EMC infrastructure (such as the Data Domain backup deduplication  system or VNX storage system).

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Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) for (storage) dummies

Bart Sjerps Oracle

Columnar Basalt Landscape

Although EMC and Oracle have been long-time partners, the Exadata Database Machine is the exception to the rule and competes with EMC products directly. So I find myself more and more in situations where EMC offerings are compared directly with Exadata features and functions. Note that Oracle offers more competing products, including some storage offerings such as the ZFS storage appliance and the Axiom storage systems, but so far I haven’t seen a lot of pressure from those (except when these are bundled with Exadata).
Recently I have visited customers who asked me questions on how EMC technology for databases compares with, in particular, Oracle’s Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) on Exadata. And some of my colleagues, being storage aliens and typically not database experts, have been asking me what this Hybrid Compression thing is in the first place.

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Managing REDO log performance

Bart Sjerps Oracle, Performance


I have written before about managing database performance issues, and the topic is hot and alive as ever. Even with today’s fast processors, huge memory sizes and enormous bandwidth to storage and networks.

warning: Rated TG (Technical Guidance required) for sales guys and managers 😉

A few recent conversations with customers showed other examples of miscommunication between IT teams, resulting in problems not being solved efficiently and quickly.
In this case, the problem was around Oracle REDO log sync times and some customers had a whole bunch of questions to me on what EMC’s best practices are, how they enhance or replace Oracle’s best practices, and in general how they should configure REDO logs in the first place to get best performance. The whole challenge is complicated by the fact that more and more organizations are using EMC’s FAST-VP for automated tiering and performance balancing of their applications and some of the questions were around how FAST-VP improves (or messes up) REDO log performance.

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