Oracle’s Engineered Systems - TCO And Manageability (Part 1)

In 2009, something revolutionary happened : Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corp, after having just acquired  Sun Microsystems, coined a new term which was to create a new era in the Enterprise Hardware/Software industry. The new term was to be a harbinger of a new world of innovation that the industry had to see and experience, and also adapt and keep pace with. This was not just a term to be used in marketing jargon, but Larry ‘actually’ presented the first ‘Engineered System’ – Exadata V2– Sun hardware running Oracle Database(V1 was on HP Hardware), thereby confirming Oracle’s dedication to new arenas of innovation and continuous delivery. Exadata V1 was mainly concentrated at Data Warehousing, whereas Exadata V2 became World's Fastest Machine for OLTP with an Extreme Performance for random I/O and was Fault tolerant.

Exadata was soon followed up with ExaLogic, Exalytics, Big Data Appliance and ZFS Storage to tackle various performance and business challenges and offer customers a seamless engineered system wherein all layers , right from the Operating System to the Application running on it was developed and provided by ONE VENDOR - i.e, Oracle – this is important – offering the complete stack by ONE vendor was something unprecedented. 

There are some very important strategic reasons for a customer to choose an Engineered System(and that too choosing a vendor who offers the whole stack) and in this blog I would like to highlight two such factors, which I think are extremely important and often go unnoticed while underscoring the other equally great features.

Total Cost of Ownership

While budgeting for the IT spends - mainly for new product or technology solutions, CIOs might look at software license costs, maintenance & support costs, install and upgrade costs and numerous other variables. The so called "hidden costs" of technology acquisition generally over-weigh the initial acquisition costs. Also, the importance of Return-On-Investment(ROI) cannot be stated less, as the investment should cause lucrative results for the organization.

Each of the costs mentioned in the below schematic represents substantial amount of time or money incurred by any organization. By looking at TCO as a whole, and hence factoring in all possible expenditures during the useable and depreciable life of the product is important while evaluating a product against the competing products.

Acquisition Costs	Operating Costs	Infrastructure Costs	Change Costs	Miscellaneous Costs
Planning and Research Costs	Design & Implementation Costs	Space Utilization	Decommissioning or Disposition costs	Compute loss/productivity loss while in training or downtime
Procurement Costs	Training Costs	Power or Energy Consumed	Depreciation Costs	Downtime, failures and outages
Licenses	Administrative Costs	Administrative Costs	Replacement Costs	Quality or User Acceptance
Installation/Deployment	Annual Subscription, Support & Maintenance	Insurance	Scalability(scaling up or down or out) expenses	Depreciation expense tax savings
Inspection Costs	Compliance Costs	Security		Open Standards and Interfaces
		Logistics Costs		Time value of money
		'Green' costs		Ownership costs
		Storage Costs
		Disaster Recovery

And this where Oracle's Engineered Systems offer one of the best solutions in the market. By offering the complete stack, right from the Hardware to Operating System and then up the stack till the Applications, Oracle is the *only* technology company which presents Lowest TCO for Engineered Systems. Lets look at an actual example of what Oracle provides and what is being provided by a Company which claims to be Oracle's competitor.

	From Oracle	A company which claims to be Oracle's Competitor
Applications	Fusion	X
Middleware	Fusion Middleware Weblogic	X
Database	Oracle / MySQL / BerkeleyDB / TimesTen	X
Management	Enterprise Manager
Operating system	Oracle Enterprise Linux / Solaris
Virtualization	Oracle VM
Server	X86/SPARC
Storage	ZFS/Exadata
Development	Java et al	X

Though there might be suspicions of vendor lock-in by looking at the above schematic, it should be noted that the actual 'value' of Engineered Systems lie in the fact that the TCO is reduced and also the customer need not run from vendor-to-vendor for any product issues, support or escalations. Also, there is a higher risk of running multiple vendors in the engineered system stack, as compliance and certification issues need to be suitably addressed. If one Vendor goes out of business in the 'diverse' stack, the customer may be in a soup. Oracle addresses all these concerns by offering a simple solution for different business challenges and hides the complexity of these systems from being exposed to the customers. Since, the stack is based on Open Standards and Interfaces, it becomes even more easier for the Customer not to fall into any trap.

Also, one of the most important things to note here is, there is not much training involved or skills to be learnt to get onto the Engineered Systems arena. Lets take the example of Exalytics - Oracle's In-Memory Analytics Machine. This takes the usual OBIEE suite and runs it on a much better hardware and utilizes the in-memory capabilities of TimesTen and makes the software run like a sprinter. Customers who are running OBIEE on component hardware can easily get on-board in a matter few days(or hours!). In the case of Exalogic, the processing powers of the compute nodes can be harnessed by moving your existing applications *as-is* onto Exalogic. Private clouds can easily be implemented with these Exa machine for solving various business problems.

Manageability

Monitoring the hardware  and the software installed is one of the biggest tasks of any IT/Admin team. With hundreds or thousands of servers running different versions of software in an enterprise, the administrators face many challenges like:

• health of the software and hardware, 
• patching, 
• performance of the applications, 
• changes in the configurations files,
• provisioning , 
• role based access to the applications,
• installing and upgrading software , 
• auditing, 
• managing incidents, 
• log diagnostics etc 

Many Enterprises use different tools for monitoring different components of the stack.Operating System, Middleware and Applications generally have their own class of monitoring tools and the administrators of respective departments are responsible for these disparate tools. User's role and responsibility again have to be taken care of on these dissimilar systems and also the same needs to be propagated to the applications. These only increase the headache of the administrators. There is a need for a 'single' monitoring solution which takes care of not only these but many other administrative challenges.

Oracle Enterprise Manager is the *only* comprehensive and integrated solution which can take care of the entire software and hardware stack. All the lifecycle aspects of the software installed are taken care of pretty easily with extremely helpful navigation and workflows. The incident management and the alert system notifies the administrator suitably when there is any hiccup in the system. Patching numerous servers in one-go or provisioning new systems becomes extremely easy with Enterprise Manager. The extremely rich feature set offered by Enterprise Manager coupled with equally great customization abilities offers one of of the best integrated management solution in the market now (personally, i do not know of any competitor's product which can even claim to be on par with the features offered by Oracle's Enterprise Manager).

The special and intuitive interfaces in EM for the Exa line of products, helps one to quickly identify the bottlenecks in the engineered systems and lets the administrator to suitably allocate resources based on the demand and also report to Oracle for any service-requests or assistance.

With the recent 12c release, Oracle Enterprise Manager provides extremely diverse set of tools for easier cloud management. Though, i can go on and on about the feature set(trust me, EM is an extremely powerful and BIG product with truck loads of useful features), i would restrict myself for now and let you explore more by looking at the various screen-casts and the whitepapers that are published in here. Since this blog is about Business Intelligence, we will look at some of the OBIEE specific features supported by EM in the later posts, especially, the OBIEE Management Pack and the TimesTen In-Memory Database plugin which offer some very interesting features for monitoring the Analytics stack. 

And if you thought Oracle Enterprise Manager was a place for monitoring only Oracle's product line alone, then you might want to change that perception by checking out the Extensibility Exchange site wherein different plugins are listed for managing different software components. This extremely useful community platform appreciates innovation and provides a means by which third party vendors can publish their plugins which can be included in Enterprise Manager.

In the next post, we will look at the other features offered by Engineered Systems which makes it a compelling choice for our customers.