It’s an interesting IT dilemma: how best to make infrastructure investments with confidence when times are changing so rapidly.
Many parts of the IT landscape—collaboration, decision support, greenfield applications—already are going to a public cloud. But a critical part of the landscape is stubbornly resistant—those critical back-office applications and databases that power your business. You know, those apps where someone might get fired when things go seriously wrong.
Public cloud might not be an option for any number of reasons. Policy. Latency. Data gravity. The need for IT to be fully in control 24x7. The concerns might vary, but the conclusion remains the same: Those workloads aren’t going to a public cloud anytime soon.
But your IT organization still must make progress. How do you get critical workloads closer to the benefits of a cloud model, without actually moving workloads to a public cloud?
Private Clouds Not Always the Answer
The industry is chock full of virtualized private cloud systems that consolidate generic workloads and offer some subset of cloud benefits. But when it comes to bet-your-job applications and databases, that popularity diminishes rapidly.
Why? Those systems were designed to consolidate general-purpose workloads, not optimize specific ones. Predictable performance can be an issue. Overprovisioning hardware and software licenses can make them unduly expensive. And when it comes to support, the customer is inevitably dealing with multiple vendors and revision levels.
Again, none of these things may be of serious concern when trying to consolidate everyday workloads, but they become much more serious when considering those critical-to-the-business workloads.
Enter Oracle Engineered Systems
Not surprisingly, a huge number of critical applications—in many cases, Oracle applications—run on the Oracle database. The idea behind Oracle Engineered Systems is to co-engineer that software and the underlying hardware together, delivering levels of performance, availability, security, and functionality that just aren’t available elsewhere.
It’s not a new offering. Oracle Exadata, the company’s first engineered system, is now entering its seventh generation, running tens of thousands of demanding workloads in organizations large and small.
What’s relatively new is how these engineered systems can help critical workloads get closer to cloud—without customers having to move to a public cloud.
Cloud-Ready Infrastructure
IT leaders face a tough choice. They spend big money on critical infrastructure, and that investment is expected to last five years, maybe longer. At the same time, today’s “no cloud” policy for certain workloads could quickly become a “cloud now” policy with a change of management or strategy. And no one wants to get stuck when things change.
How do you optimize for today, yet plan for tomorrow?
That’s the idea behind Oracle’s cloud-ready infrastructure. IT leaders can show immediate and dramatic improvements for critical applications and databases, and at the same time have cloud insurance for the future.
The first form of cloud insurance are exact equivalents of on-premises systems available as-a-service in the public Oracle Cloud, The only difference between the two is that the public cloud service supports a cloud operational model and a cloud consumption model.
For example, pair an Oracle Exadata Database Machine with Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service, and intermixing applications and databases becomes almost trivial.
The second, more recently introduced deployment model is Oracle Cloud at Customer. With this unique model, Oracle delivers Oracle Cloud services—PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS—and a public cloud consumption model in the customers’ own data centers.
Investing with Confidence
One of the great philosophical questions is: What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? In our IT world, those immovable objects are critical applications and databases. Companies just don’t want to move them—today. And, of course, our irresistible force is cloud.
Oracle has provided a unique way out of this conundrum with its cloud-ready engineered systems. Because all workloads aren’t created equally.
Chuck Hollis is senior vice president for converged infrastructure at Oracle.
