Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Remember, you are being measured against a cloud provider that can deploy systems in
minutes. By working to achieve standards and shifting the decision making to the
individual requesting the system, you have accomplished two things. Now the end user
feels empowered to make the appropriate decision based on their requirements. The
second is a byproduct of the first: how many man-hours have been returned to the
business because we no longer have a team of individuals determining what is the
“right” server to provide the individual requesting the server.
But wait, there's more! Service providers charge their customers based on the options
they choose when building their systems. Putting a solution such as VMware vCenter
Automation Center in place lays the foundation to begin showing the application owner
and the business what it costs to run these systems and, if IT decides to, to begin
charging for the services delivered. Think about it: If someone is paying for the number
of CPUs and RAM they are consuming, are they not more likely to appropriately size
their systems? You can use the term “business transparency” to replace “charge back.”
Procurement now shifts from managing individual requests as they come into the
infrastructure and all the individual components of that infrastructure (server, storage,
network, and so on) to the platform level. Procurement now becomes about ensuring
enough resources to satisfy the platform. Having a centralized system managing the life
cycle of your infrastructure components provides greater insight into consumption of
services, which in turn gives better transparency and visibility into hardware utilization
and the need for additional resources.
Tip
To drive down operational complexities and increase the ability to deliver
requests to the business, consider a tiered database offering and personalized
delivery of these services. Use this service to provide transparency concerning
the cost of running these services.
Physical Hardware
Now we are going to discuss the importance of selecting the right hardware for running
your database workloads. Buy the biggest, fastest, baddest servers and storage and you
will be alright. There, that about does it, right? If it were only that simple. However,
this is how a lot of physical servers that are running database workloads today are
purchased. One of the main reasons for this is the limitations of the physical world. We
have to plan for how large this database (or databases) will be three to five years out—
and how often are we right? How often do we end up placing databases on these servers
because there is room and not because this is where we intended them to reside when
we originally designed the system. Say it with me, “consolidation.”
