Oracle’s Sun servers. Similar to the Sun
ZFS Storage Appliance, Sun Fire servers
provide a material performance boost
compared to Oracle PDIT’s legacy infrastructure. The servers are typically eight
times faster than technology purchased
three years ago and have four times the
capacity. Refresh initiatives over the last
year have realized 80 percent gains in
both space and power savings, providing
much-needed capacity for new engineering and back-office initiatives.
The new Sun Fire X4170 M2 servers
are the perfect platform for Oracle
PDIT’s highly virtualized infrastructure. With 144 GB of RAM and two
Intel Xeon X5670 processors each, the
new Sun Fire servers enable Oracle
PDIT to support 18 smaller virtual
engineering environments for development and testing, or 8 larger virtual
performance testing environments on
a single physical server. In some cases,
the division might have a combination
of both. Provisioning of both physical
and virtual environments is managed
by Oracle PDIT’s own purpose-built
DevOps application, which has allowed
staff to scale to 75,000 environments in
the development operation alone.
“This level of automation provided
by DevOps has allowed Oracle PDIT to
satisfy the ever-changing business require-
ments of Oracle’s engineering community,
creating competitive advantage by reduc-
ing the time it takes Oracle to bring new
products into the market,” says Webb.
LESSONS LEARNED
Oracle PDIT runs all flavors of software
from the various Oracle product lines on
its storage—database, middleware, and
applications. As a result, Oracle customers reap the benefits of mature products,
tested internally on taxing workloads.
“We aggressively adopt new technol-
ogy offerings and assume the risk because
we can afford to do so, providing criti-
cal feedback to our engineering teams,”
says Webb. “At the end of the day, the
customers benefit the most with a mature
product, optimally tuned for the complete
hardware and software stack.”
Oracle’s Sun unified storage solu-
tions also contain software features that
simplify handling and management.
For instance in standard environments,
switching storage systems and migrating
data from one device to another can be
laborious and costly. But Sun ZFS Storage
Appliance’s Shadow Migration feature
automates migration of referenced data
from legacy platforms, so Oracle PDIT
staff can easily migrate data without
service interruption. This transparent,
seamless transfer of data has limited
downtime during the switching process.
A resident analytics tool helps Oracle
PDIT staff understand workload specifics
in-depth, allocating hardware configura-
tions to maximize the resource utiliza-
tion. Webb says his team can identify
bottlenecks immediately and react
quickly using far more information than
they’ve had from any other vendor. “The
analytics let you drill down to a very
low level to find out how the system is
running,” says Webb. “This is extremely
relevant for storage where you have hun-
dreds or thousands of machines accessing
storage. It translates into performance
improvements, which means you can run
more jobs faster and more efficiently.”
In the coming years, Oracle PDIT plans
to replace 305 existing storage units with
123 Sun storage devices. Webb expects
Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine X2-8
to have a major impact on reporting and
business intelligence, allowing users to
perform data processes in real time. He
says having the most-recent information
available to the user base at any time
allows them to make more-informed deci-
sions much more quickly. “They don’t
have to wait 8 hours or 24 hours until the
next set of data comes in and gets updated
to run their reports. The data they see is
effectively live,” he says.
Oracle IT: Best-Practices Laboratory
All three Oracle IT divisions—Oracle Product Development IT (Oracle PDIT), Oracle Commercial IT (Oracle CIT), and
Oracle Global IT—are seeing the benefits of standardizing on
one infrastructure and consolidating on Oracle’s Sun solutions. Oracle’s IT and engineering, development, and support
teams meet regularly to ensure that the range of Oracle solutions is integrated and running together effectively.
“We share our insights on how our applications, database,
and middleware are running on the storage,” says Campbell
Webb, vice president of Oracle PDIT. “That information is fed
back into the group that actually designs and builds hardware
so it can be encapsulated, either in best practices around
default settings or in a future enhancement. We have very
open communication and dialogue.”
Oracle CIT Vice President of Engineering Ajay Srivastava
says that in his division, Oracle On Demand customers see
better performance, higher reliability, and a more cost-effective
solution with an end-to-end Oracle environment because the
components are optimized to work together—unlike a solution
where integration is the customer’s job.
