CIOs that are looking to optimise their infrastructure in order to ensure applications run more efficiently and at peak levels, which has to be everyone really, may find it difficult to know where to look. Some server and software platforms may be cloud-ready but might not be suitable for running legacy applications, which mean a huge investment across the board. Not something most CIOs are prepared to do or have the budget for. Other hardware and software may be suitable for upgrading on-premise infrastructure, but isn’t cloud-ready, so the CIO has to make impossible, immediate decisions about what to move to the cloud, which will inevitably be subject to change.
The Oracle SPARC and Solaris platform is different. Because it is built using the same binary interfaces, applications built on earlier releases can still run as effectively as before, yet the new hardware and software is cloud-ready and enabled for any point in the future when the organisation deems it necessary or prudent to move workloads or applications to the cloud.
This key element of Oracle’s architecture allows businesses to modernise in stages, spreading the cost out to a more manageable level and minimising disruption along the way. This is very positive, especially in light of Gartner’s prediction that whilst spending on data centre systems will continue to grow through 2018 and 2019, it will grow at an increasingly slower rate. Businesses will be looking for new ways to maximise their budgets yet still get the best performance from their applications.
Where Oracle applications are run on an Oracle SPARC and Solaris platform, performance is totally optimised. Oracle Database offers complete IO visibility, instances can be started quickly and resized dynamically for minimal disruption, SPARC servers can be zoned to allow multiple versions of databases to be run on the same server, moving between them easily. SPARC servers also provide end to end encryption and capabilities which dramatically speed up database performance. These are exclusive capabilities to SPARC servers and Solaris and really do make it an easy choice for CIOs seeking transformational performance.
Oracle Virtual Machine is also optimised when run on SPARC servers, at a great price. Oracle VM are speedily deployed and allow flexible migration of active domains and encryption for security during migration.
SPARC and Solaris aren’t just suitable for the latest Oracle applications, although if developed on a SPARC and Solaris platform, new applications can then run on older versions of the OS or be recompiled to run on X86, but this also works vice versa with older applications running on a next generation SPARC and Solaris platform, because of the neutral API it uses. This sort of architecture means Oracle SPARC and Solaris are future proofed and non-proprietary, both high priorities on the technology wish list of many organisations.
To find out more about how to future-proof and optimise your infrastructure with SPARC and Solaris, read the Oracle Solaris for Dummies Guide.