Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 5-3.
Oracle Enterprise Manager Consolidation Planner
The advisories from the Consolidation Planner tool can also consider technical and functional constraints—for
example, production and testing cannot be colocated. With Consolidation Planner, a company's IT department
could identify underutilized servers and find a way to consolidate them to free up as many as possible, at the same
time maintaining current service levels. This type of elaborate scenario planning can mitigate many of the cloud
transformation risks. You can have the confidence that applications will perform fine after the consolidation.
Consolidation Planner is discussed in more detail later in this chapter.
During the planning phase, you also need to choose the cloud service delivery model (that is, IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS)
that aligns best with the enterprise's business needs. IaaS can be a good starting point when your business units don't
necessarily have a standardized application development platform and are just looking to IT to provide a compute
infrastructure for their diverse applications and development environment. As we discussed earlier, enterprises can get
more value by delivering a PaaS cloud to their enterprise users. Cloud users can just focus on developing, testing, and
deploying their applications on enterprise private PaaS, delegating the operations and maintenance to IT. Enterprises
can benefit from enhanced security and compliance while maximizing component reuse, flexibility, and control.
Setting Up the Cloud
After you baseline the IT assets, decide what to upgrade or retire as part of the cloud transformation, and finalize the
cloud service delivery model, you need to set up and configure the cloud. This requires not only adding a self-service
portal in front of the existing IT infrastructure, but also setting up broad network access, resource pooling, rapid
elasticity, and measured service. You not only set up virtualization infrastructure, but also can also pool resources in
a physical infrastructure. For example, you can have database consolidation in a PaaS cloud running on the top of an
Oracle Exadata system.
