Consolidation as an industry trend - Expert Consolidation in Oracle Database 12c - page 8

especially for development and user acceptance test environments. The whole storage presented to a zone can
be block-level replicated to a remote data center, and with clever DNS changes make failover a simple operation.
A simplified deployment, as opposed to unneeded complexity, is a target worth aiming for. The downside to the Solaris
container approach is the relative high cost for the hardware. This is somewhat alleviated by the next generation
SPARC chip, called T5. Initial benchmarking suggests that the single-thread performance has improved a lot from
its predecessors.
A stepping stone on the way to the cloud
Readers with a bit of background of cloud computing will instantly recognize that many virtues of virtualization have
made their way into the cloud paradigm. Especially the decoupling of location and user session is important, and
virtualization vendors are integrating their own products into the public cloud.
Virtualization is of course used a lot in the cloud. For example, Enterprise Manager 12c “Cloud Control” has a
built-in feature to manage Oracle VM server farms to provide cloud-like functionality inside the (private) data center,
a deployment technique often referred to as “private” cloud. Cloud computing is yet another one of these overloaded
terms requiring a little explanation, so let's cover it next.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing has certainly had a big impact on the IT industry over the past years. Similar in concept to
consolidation, cloud computing offers the promise to be more flexible, start small and grow big, and only pay for the
resources you use. Cloud computing is a top level term used for many things, each of which will be discussed in its
own section below. A possible taxonomy of cloud computing is shown in Figure 1-3 .
Figure 1-3. Relevant taxonomy of cloud computing for this discussion