You'll never love an appliance like your old database Huawei recently announced a database appliance. The Appliance for Large Database is based on the Chinese data centre usurper’s FusionServer RH8100 beast that targets RISC with a battery of Xeon Intel chips. The Huawei machine has been constructed for the newest version of SAP’s Business Suite, S/4HANA, which was announced …
...I loved the Oracle Database Appliances. I sat down with our lead apps guy, went over the configuration worksheet with an Oracle engineer on the phone, then spent a couple hours doing the rack and stack and networking configuration. After that it was a complete hand off. Old servers powered down and unracked, several TB recovered from production NetApp storage, a lot of finger pointing removed, and more importantly from my perspective was containing the apps team to a small footprint of hardware which was still more than enough to meet their needs and came bundled with it's own support AND hypervisor to screw up. Really all I needed to do from that point on was give them access to a Data Domain for RMAN backups and make sure no one unplugged anything. Easy breezy, lemon squeezy.
The real worry is, that the marketing message appears to be that you no longer need any technical skills to deploy and maintain a database. This, added to storage and computing power being offloaded to cloud vendors, leads to a situation where the company has less control over its data than a plethora of vendors. I would suggest that, from the point of view of security and control, this is not a Good Thing.
>The real worry is, that the marketing message appears to be that you no longer need any technical skills to deploy and maintain a database.
So true. Mostly be because vendors want to rent systems, not sell them and purchasers want to ditch that awkward capex request with its need for justification paperwork and switch to maintenance costs. While small businesses might benefit from not needing skilled personnel to run their accounts db, if data is to be effectively used, you probably want to have database skills in-house.
And yet, nobody managed to win that million bucks from Oracle for building a generic solution that would at least meet the capabilities of an Exadata. Yet? Maybe never. If you can get better performance for the same price with an appliance, why bother with building a solution yourself that you would have to maintain later, not to mention Oracle will simply reuse whatever unique optimizations you used on the next Exadata.
So that statement about performance tradeoffs is not really true. Oh, so you mean *an analyst* said that? Well, never mind then.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
