B U S I N E S S
E N T E R P R I S E
COMPLEX BUSINESS CHALLENGES REQUIRE SIMPLE TECH SOLUTIONS
John Fowler Executive Vice President, Systems
The words “commodity system hardware” should describe something very simple. Being a commodity, system hardware should be easy to fit to a system design, source, assemble, configure, run, and manage. Based only on the words “commodity system hardware”, that’s what the experience should be. As a commodity, commodity system hardware should deliver optimal or near-optimal performance to the business quickly and easily, and that performance should improve in a linear fashion for every additional gigabyte or gigahertz or other measure of improvement in that new hardware. After all, commodity hardware is sold based on clearly enumerated specifications, and an increase in hardware capability should map simply and easily to business application performance improvements. But as businesses struggle to integrate commodity system hardware into their data centres now, the reality of “commodity” is not simple. The reality of sourcing, assembling, configuring, running, managing, and optimising a collection of bestof-breed or any less-than-best mix of different commodity system hardware is complexity.
Get real
In his “The Real-Time Enterprise” keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle Executive Vice President of Systems John Fowler opened with a reference to a quote from Oracle Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison: “…the cardinal sin of the computing industry is the creation of complexity.” Fowler talked about the complex competitive challenges that businesses face today, and offered a statement of support for Oracle customers. “We want to make it simpler to tackle complex problems,” said Fowler. The road to simple solutions to complex business problems does not go through what Fowler called
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generic technologies from a range of vendors. “In order to get at truly simplifying large-scale business problems, you have to both improve the underlying technologies to have better than generic underlying technologies, but also aggregate these things,” said Fowler. Underlying hardware technologies, and technologies that make revolutionary use of underlying hardware technologies, are a critical part of the Oracle strategy for simplifying large-scale business problems.
Get specific
In Fowler’s keynote and in other sessions at Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle executives described key Oracle hardware technologies and technologies that use hardware in revolutionary ways, including Oracle Exadata, Oracle Big Data SQL, Oracle FS1, Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Oracle Database In-Memory, Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance, and SPARC M7. The original engineered system, Oracle Exadata, pioneered the idea of “smart storage”—storage server hardware enabled and optimised for database queries by smart storage software. Oracle Exadata’s smart storage supports the concept of smart scans, which moves significant volumes of query processing from system servers to storage servers and improves Oracle Database query processing time by orders of magnitude. The recently announced Oracle Big Data SQL also uses the