Today, business runs on data. It is the fuel that powers organizations and helps them gain competitive advantage.
A goal at many organizations is to make the data that matters more broadly accessible to more users in a timely fashion. However, at the same time, enterprise data environments are becoming more complex and costly, running on many platforms, supporting many applications, and handling growing volumes of data. IT is expected to respond quickly to new initiatives that can support the business but as IT environments become more unwieldy, agility is an elusive concept.
To help alleviate the increasing pressure on IT staff members and help them reach their objectives, many IT departments have turned to virtualization. Cloud services, particularly private cloud services, as well, are being deployed to help free up strained IT resources.
A recent survey of members among members of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) examines the current state of Oracle database sites as well as the key issues administrators are facing, and the solutions they are adopting. A total of 338 respondents completed the survey which was fielded by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., and sponsored by VMware and EMC.
The survey finds that for more than two-thirds of organizations the number of Oracle databases they manage is expanding. The most pressing challenges resulting from this growth are licensing costs, additional hardware and network costs, and additional administration costs and complexity. IT administrators are under mounting pressure to increase performance, lower costs, and limit downtime across their mission-critical applications. The need for greater agility and the ability to more effectively automate and reduce provisioning times were also areas of concern, according to the survey.
For more than half the organizations surveyed, it takes the IT department 30 days or more to respond to new inititatives or deploy new solutions. For a quarter of respondents' organizations, it can take 90 days or more.
To help address the challenges they are facing, the survey finds the use of virtualization within Oracle database environments is increasing. A majority (57%) report that they are using VMware vSphere as the platform on which they virtualize. Almost two-thirds of organizations report increases just over this past year. Nearly half report that more than 50% of their IT infrastructure is virtualized.
Virtualization is also paving the way to private cloud adoption as well. Almost half of the respondents to this survey have or are considering private clouds. In addition, cloud and virtualization are being seamlessly absorbed into the jobs of most DBAs, and in some cases, helping them reduce traditional activities while they expand their roles within their organization.
The executive summary of the report, “The Empowered Database: 2014 Enterprise Platform Decisions Survey,” authored by Unisphere Research analyst Joe McKendrick, is available for download from the IOUG website. IOUG members may download the entire report.