How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Database Systems

An Oracle Business White Paper
December 2013
How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and
Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle
Database Systems
Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database
How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
Executive Overview ........................................................................... 2
Introduction ....................................................................................... 3
Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database ................................ 5
Designed to Run the Oracle Database Better ................................ 5
Configuration Sizes for Different Needs ......................................... 6
Lowering the Total Cost of Ownership ............................................... 7
Example Five-year Total Cost of Ownership Analysis .................... 8
Reducing Risk to Business Operations ............................................ 10
Improving Total System Availability ............................................. 10
Enhancing Security...................................................................... 11
Reducing Deployment and Interoperability Risks ......................... 12
Boosting User Productivity and Business Agility .............................. 13
Higher Performance Improves Productivity .................................. 13
Achieving Agility Through Scaling and Reconfiguration ............... 13
Conclusion ...................................................................................... 15
References ...................................................................................... 17
How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
Executive Overview
Traditionally, as organizations deployed new databases, new systems were deployed,
adding to equipment sprawl, increasing data center complexity, and escalating costs
in the data center. As a result, IT investments often sat underutilized yet unavailable
for the next project need. By consolidating databases onto shared infrastructure,
organizations are better positioned to manage database infrastructure to achieve
faster business results, scale systems with usage growth, and quickly react to new
business opportunities.
This paper outlines how Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database can help IT
departments consolidate database services and better utilize resources while
containing their infrastructure costs. This paper has been updated to include Oracle
Database 12c Enterprise Edition, which features a new multitenant architecture that
simplifies the process of consolidating databases onto the cloud, enabling customers
to manage many databases as one without changing their applications.
The solution brings three significant advantages:

It defines a scalable architecture that enables consolidation of Oracle Database
infrastructure, simplifies operations, and lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO) for
operating a number of databases. A sample TCO analysis in this paper shows how a 50
percent savings can be achieved by replacing older infrastructure with a configuration based
on Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database.

The solution reduces risk because it outlines proven configurations and best practices that
increase security, protect data, reduce human error, and minimize disruptions to business.

The solution increases agility and productivity, helping IT organizations react quickly to
changes in business strategies and scaling to support new programs, larger capacities,
more users, and higher transaction volumes.
A companion technical paper, “How to Consolidate, Optimize, and Deploy Oracle
Database Environments including Multitenant Database with Flexible Virtualized
Services,” describes the solution architecture in greater detail.
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
Introduction
Organizations in almost every industry rely on data-driven applications for
strategic business operations—enterprise resource planning (ERP), online
transaction procession (OLTP), data warehousing, decision support, and other
business-critical tasks. Since database systems drive these core business
functions, they have a direct impact on productivity, competitive position, and
profitability. Database systems must store, protect, and deliver information
reliably, securely, and in a timely fashion. IT organizations continually strive to
remove system performance constraints, scale services to support increasingly
complex analytics on rapidly increasing data volumes, and maintain high
service levels, all while controlling costs and staying within budget.
To assist organizations in accomplishing these goals, Oracle supplies a full
complement of database infrastructure offerings, ranging from engineered
systems—such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle
SuperCluster—to Oracle Optimized Solutions that deliver performance,
security, and reliability using a comprehensive Oracle software and hardware
stack.
Oracle designs engineered systems to reduce the cost and complexity of IT
infrastructure while increasing performance, manageability, and customer
value. Oracle Exadata Database Machine is an engineered system designed
to accelerate Oracle Database 11g and 12c services for data warehousing and
OLTP applications. Oracle SuperCluster engineered systems are Oracle's
fastest and most scalable engineered systems, and they are ideal for
consolidating databases and applications, private cloud deployments, and
Oracle software. They deliver extreme performance, the highest consolidation,
availability, and efficiency, and eliminate the risks of build-it-yourself
architectures. With the world's fastest processors and Oracle Exadata Storage
Servers optimized for Oracle Database, Oracle SuperCluster delivers
unprecedented price/performance for mission-critical databases and
applications.
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
While these factory-integrated engineered systems have tremendous value for
many customers, they might not be the optimal solution for all sites and all
business needs. Engineered systems are purchased and shipped as specific
configurations, so they aren’t the best fit for organizations that might not
require or be in a position to benefit from the Oracle Exadata Storage Servers
included with those products. With Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle
Database, organizations can continue to invest in SAN storage or other
currently installed technologies yet also benefit from technology advancements
that are enabled by using multiple Oracle products together.
Bringing together Oracle products and technologies at each tier, Oracle
Optimized Solutions act as a blueprint to implement a complete solution,
saving money, reducing integration risk, improving productivity, and shortening
time to deployment. Oracle performs extensive testing and validation so that
each solution reflects proven best practices that address important challenges
in the enterprise. Deploying an Oracle Optimized Solution also means that
there is a single point of accountability for purchasing, deployment,
maintenance services, and ongoing support.
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database
Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database combines state-of-the-art Oracle products and
technologies in an architecture that consolidates, simplifies, and accelerates Oracle Database system
deployments. As shown in Figure 1, the solution architecture leverages Oracle components—storage
and compute systems, built-in virtualization, the Oracle Solaris operating system, and, of course, the
Oracle Database software itself. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c manages the database environment
through an intuitive administrative interface while Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c supplies
management and monitoring of Oracle server hardware, firmware, operating systems, virtual servers,
and updates. The solution is an attractive foundation for data-driven applications from Oracle or
independent software vendors (ISVs).
Designed to Run the Oracle Database Better
Oracle has made significant engineering investments to improve the results when Oracle products are
used together. These cross-product optimizations deliver advantages in areas such as performance,
security, system reliability, and ease of data center operations. A few examples of these efforts include

Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM for SPARC—Built-in virtualization technologies
enable consolidating multiple Oracle Database instances safely on dense SPARC servers,
allowing databases to be centralized while also providing isolation for security and maintaining
predictable performance.

Oracle Database 12c Cloning—The integration of Oracle Database 12c cloning with the
Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance snapshot feature allows DBAs to create copies of their
databases with a simple database command. This allows database staff the freedom to manage
copies of their databases to improve the management of test and QA projects.

Transparent Data Encryption—When this Oracle Database feature is enabled, the database
automatically accesses on-core cryptography engines in the solution’s servers to protect
sensitive data, allowing organizations to use encryption pervasively to reduce risk with little
impact on performance and administration.
While Oracle Database releases are available for a number of commercially available operating systems,
virtualization technologies, and hardware platforms, there are unique advantages of running Oracle
Database services on an Oracle infrastructure.
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
Figure 1. Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database leverages a complete stack of Oracle products and
technologies to streamline mission-critical database deployments.
Configuration Sizes for Different Needs
Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database can be deployed on configurations of various sizes. All
configurations share the same underlying architecture and are based on Oracle’s enterprise-class
platforms, creating an infrastructure solution that is highly scalable, optimized for Oracle Database
performance, and engineered to support continuous availability of business-critical databases and
applications.
Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database targets the following goals:

Lowering the total cost of ownership for database systems

Reducing risk and maintaining continuous availability of IT and business operations

Increasing user productivity and business agility
The remainder of this paper explores how the solution helps organizations attain these objectives.
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
Lowering the Total Cost of Ownership
When consolidating using Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database, there are a number of
factors that contribute to containing costs while enabling growth:

Higher consolidation ratios—Oracle Optimize Solution for Oracle Database leverages the world's
fastest database and enterprise Java servers. These new systems provide significantly higher
processing power, memory bandwidth, and capacity, as well as the latest-generation I/O
architecture, resulting in numerous performance world records1. With higher performing systems, a
larger number of databases can be supported per system resulting in fewer deployed systems, lower
maintenance costs, less administration, energy savings, and less data center floor space.

Higher data compression—The integration of Oracle storage products and Oracle Database to
deliver Hybrid Columnar Compression reduces storage needs and drives more efficient use of
storage resources. HCC can reduce storage needs by 10 to 50 times and accelerate query
performance by greatly reducing the size of data transfers from storage to CPU during these
operations. These effects combine to deliver better results from storage investments.

Faster deployment—The time and effort expended from project conception to full operation can
be reduced by as much as 50 percent with an Oracle Optimized Solution. Oracle Engineering has
invested considerable effort architecting, testing, validating, and tuning this solution, reducing the
need for trial-and-error tuning, extensive integration testing, and HA validation onsite.

Designed-in virtualization—Designed-in virtualization with Oracle Solaris Zones, network
virtualization, and Oracle VM for SPARC provide everything needed to virtualize, consolidate, and
manage a large database environment—at no extra cost. Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle
Database provides fine-grained control of resources, down to the CPU thread, memory, I/O bus,
and network levels. Oracle Multitenant 12c enables further virtualization of databases and improves
the how Oracle Database uses system resources.
For the latest information on the performance of Oracle’s SPARC systems, see
https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/.
1
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems

Simplified administration—With an integrated family of tools designed to administer the
environment, considerable time can be saved compared to working with a variety of multivendor
tools. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c, part of the Oracle Enterprise Manager portfolio,
provides an intuitive interface for monitoring and managing the solution hardware, firmware, virtual
systems, operating system instances, administrative rights, patching, and updates. By adding other
modules from the Oracle Enterprise Manager family, administrators can control Oracle Database
instances and Oracle Applications across the entire enterprise. Oracle has also invested in
engineering best practices for this solution, including techniques that clone Oracle Database 11g
databases and their virtual environments up to 50x faster than manual methods, simplifying and
accelerating the creation of development and test systems.

Guaranteed compatibility—New hardware deployments often include “hidden” costs, such as
forced software upgrades or rework of custom code and utilities. Oracle Optimized Solution for
Oracle Database features Oracle Solaris, which runs applications, utilities, and databases unchanged
across Oracle Solaris releases providing investment protection and avoiding unplanned upgrade
costs.
These are a few examples of advanced engineering efforts that enable organizations to deploy and
operate a more efficient database environment that delivers better services while containing costs.
Example Five-year Total Cost of Ownership Analysis
To demonstrate the level of potential savings, this section presents a five-year TCO analysis,
comparing the costs of operating an existing farm of legacy UNIX systems to the costs of deploying
and operating a new Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database based on Oracle’s SPARC T5
servers. Database workloads, coupled with performance data from proof-of-concept testing, were used
to develop a proposed configuration that delivers the same level of performance. Equivalent SANbased RAID 5 storage and Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g licenses were used as the basis of
both configurations. For the Oracle Optimized Solution case, Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle
RAC) licenses were added to the configuration to enhance the value provided by the solution with full
database high availability.
The TCO analysis in Figure 2 demonstrates that there is a considerable financial benefit to upgrading
from legacy systems—Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise M5000 systems, in this example—to Oracle
Optimized Solution for Oracle Database. This was the case including the enhanced availability offered
by Oracle RAC on the Oracle Optimized Solution configuration. Similar savings can be expected for
other server models or UNIX system vendors. Highlights of the results include the following:

A five-year TCO savings of US$5.25 million, approximately 50 percent of the five-year TCO for the
legacy systems solution

53 percent lower hardware costs, taking into account the cost of acquiring the proposed solution as
well as service and support costs for both the legacy and the proposed systems

A 7-to-1 ratio of server platforms when consolidating SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers onto a
configuration of Oracle’s SPARC T5-4 servers
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems

4x lower power and cooling costs

5x less floor space used

Database availability with Oracle RAC built into the new configuration
Figure 2. Five-year TCO comparison between new Oracle Optimized Solution deployment and legacy installation.
Key Assumptions for Five-Year TCO Analysis

TCO analysis was done using industry-accepted formulas. Power consumption and floor space
requirements sourced from Oracle published data. Performance/sizing data used from internal
Oracle testing results.

TCO analysis includes cost of servers, storage, SAN infrastructure, hardware maintenance, Oracle
Database, Enterprise Edition 11g license, operating system RTU, and costs for software
maintenance, floor space, and estimated power and cooling.

No annual usage growth rate was applied. Hardware deflation rate used was 15 percent and base
inflation rate was 5 percent.

The legacy configuration included six SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers, each with eight
SPARC64 VI 2.15-GHz processors and 128 GB of RAM; eight SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers,
each with eight SPARC64 VI 2.66-GHz processors and 128 GB of RAM; and 34 TB of usable of
mid-range SAN-attached storage connected through 72 FC SAN ports.

The proposed configuration included two SPARC T5-4 servers, each with four SPARC T5 3.6-GHz
processors and 2 TB of RAM. A Pillar Axiom 600 array from Oracle was configured with two
slammers and six bricks (disk trays) for a total of 34 TB of usable RAID 5 storage and 48 ports of 16
Gb SAN switching.
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
Reducing Risk to Business Operations
Oracle Optimized Solutions reduce overall risk to business operations by offering a proven
architecture that Oracle prevalidates for compatibility, performance, and reliability. Oracle Engineering
implements and tests the solution through an iterative process. The solution architecture addresses the
need for continuous database availability, incorporating redundant components, fault detection, and
clustering technologies to reduce the risk of a production outage.
“Twenty percent of respondents report having three or more days of unplanned downtime during the past year, and close to half report
three or more days of planned downtime. Whether it’s planned or unplanned, there is a cost to downtime, and most respondents report
their businesses regularly feel the effects of these interruptions—both at a business and IT operational level.”
Joseph McKendrick
“Enterprise Data and the Cost of Downtime”
2012 IOUG Database Availability Survey, Unisphere Research, July 2012
Improving Total System Availability
Significant investments have been made in the Oracle software and hardware stack to ensure that the
highest possible levels of availability can be achieved. Engineering work around maximizing availability
is focused in three areas. The first area targets planned and maintenance outages by increasing the
variety of operational tasks that can be performed during live operations. The second area focuses on
the management of minor problems that can be done without removing systems or components from
service. The third area is providing automatic service restoration in the event of a major system,
network, or storage problem. The following are examples of some of the unique availability
advantages of Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database:

Oracle Solaris Optimized Shared Memory—Oracle Solaris 11.1 has been architected to provide
support for massive compute and memory capacity. With Optimized Shared Memory, the database’s
system global area (SGA) can be resized online without a reboot or a database restart, providing
greater flexibility and the ability to scale for growth without impacting user access to database
services. Additionally, database startup and shutdown time is 8x faster, so when a shutdown is
required, the outage time can be reduced.

Live migration—Logical domains containing Oracle Database instances can be migrated between
servers without downtime. This allows hardware service and upgrades or software maintenance to be
performed without requiring a maintenance shutdown. Live migration requires that the source and
target servers have shared access to storage and networking.

Predictive Self-Healing—This Oracle Solaris feature enables SPARC servers to predict component
failures accurately and mitigates many serious problems before they actually occur. The system
receives data related to hardware and software errors, and the system automatically diagnoses the
underlying problem. Once diagnosed, the system automatically responds by offlining faulty
components. Removing degraded components before they actually fail minimizes the impact on
users and operations.
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems

Domain reconfiguration—Depending on the system, some configurations permit reconfiguration
(removing or adding physical hardware and cards) while the database environment is still running.
This allows hardware repairs or upgrades to occur without disrupting the system or the database
operations.

Protection against individual component failures—Oracle’s SPARC servers provide redundant
power supplies, cooling, storage connections, and network connections. Unique among
enterprise-class UNIX systems, Oracle’s SPARC M6-32 servers can tolerate a CPU failure, a
memory failure, or the failure of a level 1, level 2, or level 3 cache without shutting down an entire
server or virtual system. The result is not only continued operation but also minimal impact to users,
performance, database services, and hosted applications.

Protection against system failures—Oracle RAC supports the transparent deployment of a single
database across pools of servers, providing fault tolerance from hardware failures or planned
outages. Oracle RAC supports mainstream business applications of all kinds, including OLTP,
decision-support system (DSS), and mixed OLTP/DSS environments. While Oracle RAC is
available for many platforms, it has been fully tested and validated in the Oracle Optimized Solutions
configurations.

Quality of service (QoS) for storage—Because storage often is a resource that is shared among
databases, applications, and other components, deployments can face a risk if activity on one system
unexpectedly impacts another system. Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600 storage systems allow organizations
to differentiate between QoS levels that different applications and databases require. Administrators
can use the Pillar Axiom user interface to assign a QoS priority, allowing the storage environment to
deliver expected I/O performance for high-priority workloads even when other activity is underway.
Enhancing Security
The Oracle Solaris operating system provides unparalleled security features, including many that
originated in previous military-grade versions of the operating system. In conjunction with Oracle
Solaris Zones, the operating system offers a sophisticated user and process rights management scheme
that supports secure multitenancy of sensitive databases and applications within the same system. User
rights management in Oracle Solaris allows administrators to create an oracle role and assign it to
multiple users with DBA responsibilities.
Oracle’s SPARC T4, SPARC T5, and SPARC M6-32 servers incorporate processors that support
widely used cryptographic algorithms, accelerating them in hardware. When the Transparent Data
Encryption feature is used to encrypt sensitive data in an Oracle Database, it optimizes performance
using hardware-based cryptographic acceleration in these systems’ processors. Since many laws and
regulations mandate the protection of identities, financial data, health records, and other sensitive data,
organizations can implement secure queries without imposing a performance penalty or the additional
cost of add-on encryption devices. For further information about Transparent Data Encryption with
Oracle Database, see “High Performance Security for Oracle Database and Fusion Middleware
Applications using SPARC T4.”
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
Reducing Deployment and Interoperability Risks
Extensive solution testing benefits enterprise deployments because it lowers risk, preventing delays that
can otherwise occur during build-out and implementation. With Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle
Database, everything that is required to deploy a mission-critical database system—ranging from
advanced database functionality to the disk drives where data is stored—has been predefined and
tested. By providing a complete solution that spans the database, clustering, virtualization, file system
and volume management, operating system, servers, networks, disk storage, and management tools,
Oracle removes many of the complexities that are common in constructing a complete database
infrastructure.
Figure 3 shows the broad variety of technologies needed to support a database solution and illustrates
the complexity involved in building a solution using components from multiple vendors. Challenges
can include integrating and testing technology stacks, determining initial compatibility (and
compatibility after subsequent updates), managing the environment, and dealing with different service
and support organizations. In contrast, deploying Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database
implies

A complete solution that is optimized and tested to support mission-critical database environments

Hardware and software designed and tested to work together to avoid compatibility issues and to
maximize the quality of the overall solution

A single service and support organization for the entire environment

Availability of an integrated portfolio of management tools—Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle
Enterprise Manager Ops Center—that can be used to manage the environment, including
applications, the database, virtual systems, the operating system, storage, firmware, administrative
rights, patching and updates, and more
Figure 3. Oracle provides a comprehensive single-vendor solution that reduces deployment and interoperability risk.
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
Boosting User Productivity and Business Agility
Higher Performance Improves Productivity
Increased database system performance can translate directly into gains in efficiency and productivity
for application users. These gains can have a direct financial impact on key business metrics, for
example:

Faster response times and lower latency can supply a strategic competitive advantage, improving the
user experience, increasing customer loyalty, and boosting sales.

Processing more transactions in a given time can allow workers to be more productive, allowing
them, for example, to handle more sales or support calls per hour.

Reduced query times can enable business decisions to be made earlier and allow for additional
analysis, enabling more-informed decision-making.
As mentioned earlier in the paper, Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database leverages the
world’s fastest database and enterprise Java servers that hold over twenty-performance world records1.
Achieving Agility Through Scaling and Reconfiguration
Once a mission-critical database system is deployed and operating, it must adjust and scale to meet
future business requirements. Two factors contribute to the inherent agility of database systems:

Initial system sizing, including built-in expansion to accommodate growth in database capacity,
transaction volumes, and applications

The ability of the solution to incorporate enhancements and expand throughout its lifecycle
Since critical database systems are often deployed for five years or longer, it is sometimes difficult to
project future needs accurately. Events such as acquisitions, new partnerships, new applications, or
unanticipated user growth can dictate performance requirements that are hard to foresee. Even with
the best capacity planning efforts, the flexibility to scale and grow can determine the actual lifespan of a
production system.
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
Scaling a database system extends beyond CPU performance and encompasses total memory capacity,
I/O throughput and latency, storage capacity, networking, and the scalability of the operating system
kernel. Oracle Database systems provide the ability to scale in several dimensions in response to
changing business needs without disrupting operations or requiring extensive IT administrative effort.
Examples include the following:

Scaling through density and advanced multithreading—Database growth, such as higher
transaction volumes or an increased number of records, can drive the need for greater processing
power and associated memory. The Oracle Solaris operating system and Oracle’s SPARC server line
have long led the industry at the high end of performance scaling. Oracle Solaris naturally takes
advantage of the advanced thread scale and memory density of the SPARC T4, SPARC T5, and
SPARC M6-32 servers in this solution. The SPARC T5 servers effectively double the number of
cores and threads from the previous generation of SPARC T4 servers, enabling the support of larger
workloads within the same form factor. The SPARC M6-32 system scales up to a maximum of 32
SPARC M6 processors and an unprecedented 3072 threads.

Reconfiguration of system resources—Virtualization technologies and systems that support
reconfiguration make it easy for administrators to adjust resource allocations to match workloads.
Logical domains (configured with Oracle VM Server for SPARC) and Oracle Solaris Zones are
easily reconfigured to add or remove system resources on a domain or zone, helping virtual
environments to scale to meet growth needs. For logical domains, resources can be reconfigured
dynamically while database services continue to operate.

Scaling node count—When CPU and memory slots on available servers are fully utilized,
additional processing capacity and memory can be added by deploying more cluster nodes in an
Oracle RAC configuration. This can be done live, avoiding any impact to the applications currently
in use.

Increasing I/O performance and reducing storage footprint—Unique to Oracle storage,
Hybrid Columnar Compression technology is a technique for compressing data in a database block
before sending it to storage in the solution. As the name implies, Hybrid Columnar Compression
uses a hybrid approach—a combination of both row and columnar methods—for storing data.
Enterprises with existing Oracle Database instances and in-database archives for OLTP, data
warehousing, or mixed workloads can achieve 10x to 50x reductions in data volumes by using
Hybrid Columnar Compression on the Pillar Axiom 600 or Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance products.
Sites that implement Hybrid Columnar Compression have experienced as much as 3x to 5x
reductions in their overall storage footprints. Also, there can be significant performance gains
because data moved between the Oracle Database server and storage is compressed, so there is less
data to transmit.

Increasing I/O performance using Hybrid Storage Pools. Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance is
designed to recognize I/O patterns automatically, and it places data on the best storage media using
a Hybrid Storage Pool approach. This technique results in impressive gains in read and write
performance, taking advantage of low-latency solid-state drives (SSDs) that act as a cache between
the storage server and the hard disks in the storage array.
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems

Expanding storage capacity and throughput—Pillar Axiom 600 storage systems allow for
live expansion to grow both capacity and I/O performance without disrupting access to storage.
Unlike with many storage products, the Pillar Axiom 600 architecture allows organizations to scale
the system bandwidth and RAID processing power as well as traditional storage capacity without
disruption while the system is in use.
Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database provides tremendous flexibility throughout the
deployment lifecycle. Because the underlying SPARC servers offer advanced thread scale (with up to
3072 threads in the SPARC M6-32 system), the solution features dramatic scalability for efficient
consolidation and expansion of Oracle Database workloads over time.
Conclusion
Database systems are vital to the success of business and government entities of all sizes, which is why
IT departments strive to deliver database services with optimal performance and service levels. When
deploying Oracle Database, IT managers must take into account strategic business goals and three core
objectives—reducing costs, lowering risk, and improving support for business operations. Oracle
Optimized Solution for Oracle Database is designed to help companies achieve these goals.
Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database is a fully tested, tuned, and documented architecture
for consolidating Oracle Database workloads onto a highly available, scalable, and secure
infrastructure. It brings together a complete hardware and software stack that is engineered for optimal
performance and mission-critical availability, helping IT organizations efficiently and cost-effectively
support fundamental business processes and data-driven operations.
Different configurations are available to match workload size, the databases to be consolidated, and
site requirements. The solution offers tight integration with Oracle Database, offering resilient
platforms for continuous data availability, even for the most demanding applications. And since the
solution stack is based on components that are all available from Oracle—a trusted business partner—
implementing the solution gives organizations a single touch point for purchasing, deployment,
services, training, and ongoing support.
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
Table 1 summarizes key advantages and business benefits.
TABLE 1. ORACLE OPTIMIZED SOLUTION FOR ORACLE DATABASE—KEY ADVANTAGES AND BUSINESS BENEFITS
BUSINESS BENEFIT
HOW ORACLE OPTIMIZED SOLUTION ENABLES THE BUSINESS BENEFIT
Contain costs
 Built with the fastest servers for Oracle Database, the solution enables organizations to
operate Oracle Database with less hardware, fewer licenses, and a smaller footprint
resulting in lower overall costs.
 Guidelines for a tested and tuned solution greatly simplify deployment and management.
 The solution is administered with a consistent set of tools that work together to simplify
administration.
Reduce risk
 Solution components are designed and validated together, helping sites avoid compatibility
issues and unforeseen problems.
 Patches and updates are tested on the full solution, not just on individual components.
 Highly reliable systems, a high availability architecture, redundant hot-pluggable
components, and predictive self-healing capabilities reduce the risk of downtime.
Boost productivity and
 Massive thread scale in the solution’s SPARC servers supports excellent scalability.
business agility
 The solution provides integrated virtualization with fine-grained control of resources, down
to the CPU thread, memory, I/O bus, and network levels.
 The ability to scale a database system by growing the Oracle RAC cluster without downtime
enables immediate upgrades, eliminating the need to wait for planned downtime.
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle Database Systems
References
For more information, see the resources listed in Table 2.
TABLE 2. RESOURCES FOR FURTHER INFORMATION
WEB RESOURCES
Oracle Optimized Solution
http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/oos/database/overview/index.html
for Oracle Database
Oracle Optimized Solution
http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/oos/database/overview/index.html
for Enterprise Database
Cloud
WHITE PAPERS
How to Consolidate,
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/hardware-solutions/o12-032-howto-db-
Optimize, and Deploy
throughput-avail-1592601.pdf
Oracle Database
Environments including
Multitenant with Flexible
Virtualized Services
(technical paper)
“Benefits of Deploying a
http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/edbc-cloud-sparc-supercluster-1899065.pdf
Cloud to Deliver
Database as a Service”
“The SPARC Difference:
http://oracle-downloads.com/sparc_difference.pdf
Reduce Risks, Cut Costs,
Power Innovation”
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How to Save Money, Reduce Risk, and
Copyright © 2013. Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Increase Agility When Deploying Oracle
Database Systems
This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This
December 2013, Version 3
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Authors: Ken Kutzer, Roger Bitar, and Larry
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