Profit Magazine - August 2011

flexibility in locating data, says Webb, dramatically increasing I/O rates. “We’re seeing remarkable changes in applications performance by changing out the underlying infrastructure and making these new technologies available through the software layers,” he says.

COMMERCIAL IT BENEFIT

Oracle’s Commercial IT (Oracle CIT) division is the backbone of Oracle On Demand, Oracle’s hosting and management services. This IT infrastructure supports 4. 5 million Oracle On Demand end users whose businesses rely on subscriptions to remotely managed Oracle technology and applications.

For the IT pros inside Oracle CIT, that means maintaining vast amounts of reliable servers, storage, and backup—and the mission-critical data that courses through them. Roughly 50 percent of Oracle CIT runs on Sun hardware—most prevalently Sun servers, Oracle’s Sun unified storage solutions, Storage Tek SL48 tape library, and Oracle Exadata machines.

Oracle CIT staff have standardized both their own infrastructure and commercial customers’ storage on Sun solutions. Approximately 3 petabytes of data is now on Sun storage, which includes Oracle’s Sun unified storage solutions and Sun fibre channel storage. Oracle CIT’s hosting services include data backup, which means Oracle CIT backs up close to 1. 5 PT of data per week. Oracle CIT also offers lifecycle management to customers with Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic solutions, from purchasing to maintenance and support.

Over the next year, Oracle CIT expects to see the same 75 percent cost reduction from its use of Sun storage that Oracle PDIT has achieved. “We expect the compression deduplication ratios to be significantly better than what we were achieving with other vendors’ products,” says Ajay Srivastava, vice president of service engineering in Oracle CIT.

Advanced features in Oracle’s Sun
unified storage solutions bring many
benefits to Oracle On Demand custom-
ers. Storage systems are optimized to
use flash cache, which increases appli-
cation speed and reduces latency. The
Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Shadow
Migration feature has made transition-
ing data from other storage devices
simpler and less expensive. Srivastava
also sees benefits in duplication, rep-
lication compression, and advanced
monitoring. “These features have
allowed us to replace multiple storage
devices from other vendors with a
single unified storage system,” he says.

“Customers see unparalleled price
performance with Oracle Exadata.
. . . It’s enabling them to do things
they’ve never done before.”

—Mark Sunday, CIO, Oracle

guarantee customers backup of their production and nonproduction data for a specified amount of time. “Storage Tek tape storage products provide greater flexibility and security for complex and heterogeneous environments managed by Oracle On Demand,” says Srivastava.

Sun servers have been standard
hardware for Oracle On Demand ser-
vices for more than five years. More
than 3,000 Sun servers support Oracle
CIT’s multitiered architectures, in
both virtualized and nonvirtualized
environments. “Sun servers have been
very stable and high-performing,” says
Srivastava. “There is greater reliability
and increased uptime, which means
higher availability to our customers.”
Because Oracle Exadata is a complete
package of servers, storage, networking,
and software that is massively scalable,
secure, and redundant, it meets custom-
ers’ specific high-performance require-
ments. The benefits of Oracle Exadata for
Oracle On Demand customers include
high levels of performance with very low-
latency response times. Srivastava says
this has helped Oracle On Demand meet
the most-demanding customer loads,
while maintaining customer satisfaction.

ONE PLATFORM FOR ALL

Overall, Oracle’s IT department is seeing
significant benefits from using its Sun
hardware in the datacenter. It is also
working closely with Oracle hardware
engineering and development teams to
optimize the hardware and software to
work well together, creating a
more cost-effective, efficient,
and reliable system both inter-
nally and for Oracle customers.
Webb says Oracle has spent
millions on storage in the
past year alone, so getting the
most out of that investment
is critical to the success of IT
at the company. Continuing into 2011,
Webb will be deploying Oracle Fusion
Customer Relationship Management for
Oracle’s sales force, completely on Oracle
Exadata and Oracle Exalogic. This com-
bination of next-generation applications
with Oracle’s next-generation hardware
promises to be a major boon for the
company. “My vision is really a simple
one,” says Webb. “When you walk down
the aisle of an Oracle datacenter, all you’ll
see is Oracle Exadata and Exalogic.”
Sunday says the hardware work being
done inside Oracle IT will ultimately pay
major dividends for customers. “We are
able to leverage what we are doing at
Oracle to continue to drive advancements
in our products,” he says. “These advance-
ments help improve performance, scal-
ability, reliability, and maintainability, and
reduce total cost of ownership.” <>