Podcast: Learn how you can have your Oracle and save money too

[Sri_Raghavan]

Planning to refresh your Oracle environment, or build a new one? What’s the next step? Get answers in this podcast.

Does your enterprise, like most, run Oracle Database on premise for core business applications? This means that sooner or later you’ll face the question of how do you assemble your best infrastructure solution—whether you are launching a new project or refreshing your current environment.

A few weeks ago I had the chance to sit down with Rick Maltby, technical consultant with TBT Marketing, and we talked about this very issue. We discussed the challenges our customers often face in their Oracle environments, some of the different options and the benefits of each. And, critically, we also talked about our Oracle Performance and Cost Assessment, that helps you understand how to make the right choices in optimizing your infrastructure. You can listen to our complete podcast here: Address your Oracle challenges with HPE´s Oracle Performance and Cost Assessment.

Oracle challenges

 In the enterprise, Oracle administrators face significant obstacles in providing the performance the organization requires. Infrastructure can be overburdened as databases grow in number, size, and complexity, hitting bottlenecks in compute, storage, or the networking. The problem continues to worsen, as the environments ever larger, and the business demands greater responsiveness. At the same time, addressing growth by throwing more CPUs and servers at it can be extremely costly, as Oracle licenses (and support) are effectively priced per processor core, and additional hefty Oracle fees are required when using clustered servers to handle larger workloads.

But any changes are complicated by the high availability demanded for critical core database applications. Downtime can run ten to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour—while disaster recovery systems/processes may not have kept up with the database size and proliferation, or the recovery point or recovery time objectives required. How then do you configure a balanced approach that meets all your priorities?

The right mix

 Determining the right size and mix of infrastructure begins with understanding where bottlenecks exist, where licensing investments are paying off, and where they are not. You don’t want to purchase more CPUs to improve transaction rate on a workload that is actually I/O bound, or deploy a scale-out architecture for a workload better suited to a scale-up design.

That’s why we offer an Oracle Performance and Cost Assessment to help enterprise customers see firsthand how and where they can significantly improve performance and reduce Oracle license and support costs. Customers receive a report with specific recommendations and a summary of potential benefits, addressing increased performance, license reduction and/or consolidation, complexity, high availability, consolidated server and storage footprint, and TCO/ROI. The assessment is free of charge to qualified customers.

The key to this service is a proprietary tool—HPE Database Performance Profiler (DPP)—that runs in the background and has zero impact on Oracle database performance. DPP reporting is far richer than simply looking at Oracle AWR (Automatic Workload Repository) data. An Oracle DBA would need to pour through dozens and dozens of AWR reports to gain the insights a simple DPP graph provides. Customers can get a visual representation of how their workload is behaving and that in turn helps us to architect the right solution for them which will reduce their overall Oracle running costs. In fact, we just released a new version with even greater capabilities, DPP II, capable of analyzing both Oracle and SQL Server environments.

Listen to the podcast to learn more

I go into much more depth in the podcast, and look at specific examples, the role of storage, and clustering with Oracle RAC. Please take a moment to listen. To learn more about the Oracle Assessment, you can also look at our Oracle solutions page.

Sri Raghavan
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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