Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9
Business Values for the ODA
In September 2011, Oracle announced the availability of the Oracle Database Appliance as an innovative, entry-level
engineered system optimized for databases. The announcement promised easy deployments, pay-as-you-grow
licensing, and single-vendor support.
When a new technology is introduced, and business interest builds, someone within a company will ask the
question: “Is this a better solution than the way we do things today?”. The first step in answering this question and
overcoming resistance to change is investigating the business case for the new technology. The Oracle Database
Appliance has become a very successful product in the Oracle engineered systems product line. This chapter outlines
the business benefits offered by ODAs, which you can use to consider the business case for deploying an ODA
solution and assessing any potential technology risks.
Business Challenges
Many companies face the same challenges in meeting an ever-expanding range of business pressures. IT departments
are being asked to become agile and deliver infrastructure quickly, even before all of the business requirements have
been fully developed. Project timelines are becoming shorter and multiphased. While projects may run late during the
early stages, this doesn't mean that the project due date will necessarily be changed. Instead, later project phases may
need to make up the slack with shorter timelines. Database departments are usually at the end of the infrastructure
provisioning chain. DBAs are being asked to deploy new database infrastructure rapidly and to deliver business value to
IT customers sooner. If a project is late by the time it's time for DBAs to do their work, the lead times effectively drop to
zero. The old practices of following a cycle of gathering requirements, ordering hardware, and engaging multiple teams
with numerous handoffs between them to build database infrastructure simply don't meet modern business timelines.
Many companies face costs pressures from static budgets. New external public cloud offerings are competing
for their infrastructure budgets. For a number of years, there has been a slow shift to commodity hardware solutions
to reduce costs. While hardware related costs have fallen from commodity solutions, the costs of building and
supporting database infrastructure solutions remain high.
Companies often face challenges from shortages of people with high-end skill sets. In general, there isn't a
shortage of IT people, DBAs, and other staff. However, the mantra that “good people are hard to find in any economy”
does persist. Companies are always looking for people that can solve any technical problem, get work done quickly,
and build specialized subject matter expertise quickly.
The rapid introduction of new technologies has placed additional pressures on the availability of people with
high-end skill sets. The rapid introduction of these new technologies can require the support staff to get up to speed
without a lot of hand-holding. Support staffs have to react quickly to the challenges at hand, and task completion has
to be quick. There is little margin for errors or problems that delay projects. Common issues include:
People's plates are literally full today. There is no time for “OJT”—on-the-job training—and
research. Everything has to be jump-started.
Hourly consulting costs on projects can be very high, adding to the cost pressures. This adds to
the pressures for rapid deployment and efficiency.
 
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