Cloud Everywhere: Should datacenters follow? And how?

How can you gain from an environment that empowers your data centre in the current Cloud landscape? A webinar on ‘Next-Generation secured Cloud in your DC’ unlocks some answers

What if you could enjoy the carefree feeling of using a Bank Locker without the need to travel to the bank every time you need your stuff? The same flexibility, elasticity, scale and security – but with the control of a private pocket! That’s something a lot of enterprises are looking for when they look at the pros and cons of Public and Private Clouds. As Sunil Rajguru, Editor, Dataquest, PCQuest and CiOL put forth – a lot of needs, questions and challenges are emerging as enterprises try to maximize the advantages of an easy Cloud without sacrificing a hands-on approach or security. Specially when it comes to the consequential server footprint.

Ramakrishna Bhamidhimukkula, Senior Manager, Solution engineering, Hybrid Cloud Systems, Oracle agreed with this dilemma. We are standing today at an unprecedented inflection point for Cloud, he painted the current picture in a vivid way. “We can expect 2.5 times adoption by the time we hit 2026. It’s driven, among other things, due to the needs of bringing down IT costs. Various organisations are adopting a hybrid Cloud strategy to make Cloud work in the most optimum way. This appetite for Hybrid Cloud is also due to security reasons and the need for low-latency application environments (something that appears in the apprehension list for Public Cloud).” There are also some perceived risks about multi-tenancy and noisy neighbor scenario, he added. Reducing data centre footprint is about lots of servers and a huge chunk of data—hence, it calls for adopting a Cloud strategy where you can gain optimization with the right solutions. Other requirements for enterprises are—Better density per rack, space optimization with maximum compute muscle, a smooth transition to Cloud, and other factors.

One-button ease—Can an Appliance help?

All this boils down to the environment we create for these workloads. Plus—Cloud-native environments have to be ready for Private Cloud or Multi-Cloud environments – as per the context. That’s where you need a solution that can be optimised for Cloud platform, can be deployed on any Cloud format and is great for Cloud-native workloads. “Like the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X9 – a multi-tier solution which works as an integrated platform. It is optimised for applications and middleware. It brings reduced TCO with integrated virtualization and trusted partition lower costs.” Bhamidhimukkula explained.

To add to that, this solution is configured strongly for containerized environments, Cloud-native tooling, easily-portable applications, as well as OCI-compatible APIs and SDK. It can also offer zero-downtime upgrade for all components—while container-based services provide continuous availability, he added.

When asked about integration and scalability he told that it can handle up to eight tenancies, high availability with three fault domains, storage capacity of 180 TB to 8.4 PB, and 180 to 1080 usable CPU cores – along with requisite isolation and compartmentalisation as required by the departments of an enterprise. Its server enclave can entail 3 to 18 servers. It’s all about bringing down the datacenter cost a rack level.

But would it deliver consistently across development environments? He asserted here that the same tools and APIs working on a Public Cloud environment would be available in a Private one – thus, augmenting compatibility. “You have one environment to modernize applications, you can use legacy applications to keep everything well-consolidated and leverage this highly-dense platform quite well with a good degree of control.”

We also provide secure low-latency application to database connectivity—which is a unique feature. “This platform covers designed-in optimisations for Oracle database and multi-node connectivity.”

There is a fault-domain architecture, there is a disaster recovery feature and a lot more to reduce business downtime. He also answered questions about deployment of private Cloud appliance, how to best replicate data between sites for strong disaster recovery, management of orchestration for failover and switch-over, storage encryption for security, etc.

Examples Worth Noting

Incidentally, NASA Deep Space Network consolidated over 300 legacy servers to six Oracle Private Cloud Appliances. A US Hosting provider also deployed a turnkey infra that automated hardware and software deployment, cutting costs down by 90 per cent. Similarly, a Swedish Grocery player ICA Gruppen needed to modernise 350 databases on 70 legacy servers which had low utilization and high maintenance rates. They saved 85 per cent in total cost of ownership and gained high outcomes in many areas – by using this solution.

When asked for suggestions for improvement, he shared that he wants to further improve on cost benefits with overall investments. “Such a consolidated approach with overall maintenance – can reduce overall costs. We expect some more comfort that way—from the licensing angle.”

Speaking of future plans, he aims to run applications with heavy database requirements on this appliance. “We don’t have much focus on Public Cloud due to industry compliance limitations. For the next two to three years, we will continue the journey with Private Cloud. Four months back, we started with this solution. It is already in production use. A lot of database migration has begun and we see a lot of comfort with this decision.” The bank is also planning to get going with Big Data Analytics, AI, Machine Learning—and needs a solid and simplified infrastructure for these future plans.

Consolidation and simplification are, thus, as critical as picking the right technology. Seems like that if you plan and consolidate your IT infrastructure and workloads in the right way – whether you use a Public solution or not, you can laugh all the way to the bank.