One of the ways to cut IT costs is by consolidation. Taking several applications and consolidating them into a single infrastructure. It can be a standalone server or a grid of servers, but generally speaking – a single unified infrastructure.
Databases are one of the entities you should consider consolidating in order to cut IT costs. Not only does it save hardware and software cost, it also saves time and money in terms of support and management.
There are many vendors out there that offer consolidation environments. Some are just offering their existing database technology wrapped with high availability and DR features that make them more robust, while others, like Oracle for instance, offer a solution such as Exadata as a Database appliance that suits both OLTP and Data Warehouse (DW) systems and targets the consolidation market.
But just before you dive into a consolidation project – you must take these top 5 elements into consideration, they have to be on your check list :
1. Unified management
It doesn’t make sense to consolidate all your databases into a single infrastructure, if you can’t manage all your databases as if they were one, while keeping the ability to drill down to each and every one of them separately if needed. Unified management is crucial if you don’t want to spend too much time on support tickets and management tasks.
2. Unified performance View
When it comes down to performance analysis, seeing just one database at a time doesn’t show the whole picture. Having the ability to see all performance metrics as if it were one database, while allowing you to drill down quickly and easily – is crucial. It is also essential that you have a extensive historical performance repository that will allow you to investigate performance problems down to the individual SQL execution. Solving performance problems in a consolidated environment is by far more important since it doesn’t only affect the affected database, it also radiates to all other databases.
3. Quality of Service
What happens when one of your 100 consolidated databases, becomes busy ? It eats up all available resources causing resource starvation for all other 99 databases, which lead to Quality of Service and SLA problems. You can’t enjoy the fruits of consolidation while having your end users complaining all day long about un-stable response time.
4. High Availability
When you consolidate many databases into a single server/cluster/grid, there is always a chance that when this server becomes extremely busy and unstable, it will affect all your databases and applications. In some clusters (for instance Oracle RAC, Exadata or Greenplum, Netezza…), when one node becomes 100% utilized, it radiates to the other servers thereby slowing them down as well. This is a major risk in any consolidated environment.
5. Chargeback
You are not far from the day when all IT divisions out there, will start charging their internal customers based on actual resources usage. It doesn’t make sense for that IT division to keep on scaling out/up their systems because developers produce poorly written code. Many organizations consolidate many databases while seeking solutions in order to track resource consumptions at the DB level (or tenant level), limiting resource consumption based on the real need of that tenant, and creating billing reports based on the actual usage of CPU , IO and disk space on a monthly/quarterly basis. Even if you are still not going to charge your customers, you certainly want to produce this kind of report and share it with your superiors and customers.
MoreVRP is the only solution that addresses the database consolidation environment the way it should be addressed – covering all these 5 major aspects.
- Unified management and performance analysis – MoreVRP gives the end user a unified management and performance analysis dashboard that can take the end user from a unified view down to a SQL statement in one of the databases. You have the ability to see which is your hottest database in a unified list, find performance differences between different nodes in your cluster/grid, identify un-balanced layout of databases resource utilization and even see a “top queries” list of all databases together. These capabilities, and many others allow DBAs to easily manage and analyze their consolidated databases while dramatically shortening troubleshooting cycles .
- Quality of Services – MoreVRP is the only solution in the market that allows you to partition your resources (CPU and IO) in real-time in an accurate way and in real-time to make sure one database will not consume more than its allowed quota while boosting other more important databases.
- High Availability – MoreVRP protects your system using the MoreVRP rules of stability, not allowing a node within your grid/cluster to reach its boiling point (100% CPU or IO) while protecting your systems stability and availability.
- Chargeback – Using the Chargeback module, MoreVRP allows you to define your tenants based on any parameter you wish, track their resource consumption, force them not to consume more than they are allowed or really need, and even create the billing report.
MoreVRP now supports Oracle DB, Oracle Exadata, SQL Server, DB2, PostgreSQL and EMC Greenplum. If you consider using any of these database platforms for your consolidated environment, check out what MoreVRP can do for you.
And by the way – there is also a BONUS. MoreVRP will help you out during the transition process. Our Variance module can compare the “before consolidation” and “after consolidation” performance metrics, helping you solve performance obstacles and even show you how much time and money you saved during the process.
To read more about this – check out this post about database migrations.