Four Ways Exadata Cloud Will Lower Your TCO

When businesses look to move their databases to the cloud they often consider the capital expense they’re going to avoid by not having to purchase hardware. But there are even more savings to be found.

Here are four more areas where Oracle Cloud customers save money.

Increased Productivity through Automation

Cloud adoption allows businesses to take advantage of automation in a way that on-premises systems just don’t. Because Oracle knows not every business can jump head first into the cloud, Oracle offers options for each kind of cloud appetite. These options range from fully automated public cloud offerings (Oracle Autonomous Database) to a model where Oracle provides public cloud behind the customer’s firewall (Oracle Gen 2 Exadata Cloud at Customer), giving the customer more control over their data while still capitalizing on the benefits of the cloud. But as businesses move toward more and more automation, Oracle takes on more responsibility for the manual, and mundane, tasks that would typically soak up valuable administrator resources.

With Oracle Exadata Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, tasks like provisioning, regular maintenance, and patching of the infrastructure and Oracle Databases are all automated, so that businesses can focus their technical resources on more strategic tasks.

For example, a Dialog Semiconductor, a leading designer and developer of semiconductors for consumer electronics, cut its database creation time from days to minutes with Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer. And Vale, one of the world’s largest metals and mining companies, made database installs 16 times faster, moved database patching online, and reduced overall DBA time by 70 percent with Oracle Exadata Cloud at Customer.

Database Consolidation Benefits

Database consolidation goes hand in hand with productivity. If you’re running on physical servers, chances are that you’re running quite a few of them. Each of these servers has to be maintained.

When customers consolidate those servers onto an Exadata Cloud platform, customers:

• Dramatically reduce their database footprint, saving significant costs along the way.  In many cases, Exadata can support four times the number of databases than do-it-yourself architectures with equivalent cores because of Exadata’s extensive resource management capabilities, according to Mathew Steinberg, Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle.
• Gain significant efficiencies because Oracle makes it very easy to maintain Exadata, compared to doing manual maintenance across all those often disparate server architectures. So, productivity gains are multiplied by the amount businesses can consolidate. Plus, with Exadata Cloud, Oracle runs and maintains the infrastructure, so you don’t have to. Oracle also automates the database lifecycle management, bringing more savings.

Securing the Enterprise

We’ve already said that database updates are automated on Oracle Exadata Cloud, saving time and resources. This benefit pays off in another way. According to the 2019 Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report, 46 percent of businesses have delayed patching in order to meet a service level agreement. Other reasons for patching delays included software compatibility and resource limitations.

But, as many businesses have found out the hard way, not implementing patches in a timely manner opens up systems to avoidable security breaches. Automated patching guards organizations against this risk. Steinberg says he sees customers that allocate well over 100 Databases to a single DBA for patching and updates, making it extremely difficult for a DBA to keep those databases current. Database automation enables these customers to lower costs while improving workflows and security, and rolling patch deployment ensures that patching can be done without any downtime.

Plus, by bringing an Oracle workload to Oracle Cloud you get the automation that you wouldn’t get on other clouds that can’t automate patching for Oracle workloads.

Right Sizing – OCPU Scaling

Going with a cloud model also gives you the opportunity to right size your environment for your average use, scale up as you hit peak periods, and then scale back down to accommodate lulls. With an on-premises infrastructure, you need to size your environment for peak periods and pay for extra resources that you’ll only use occasionally.

A Cloud for Every Journey

While these four benefits:

• Productivity
• Consolidation
• Database Updates
• Right Sizing – OCPU Scaling

These won’t show up on your cloud bill, they will improve your Total Cost of Ownership, making a move to the Exadata Cloud all the more attractive.

But what path is the right path for your organization?

At Oracle, we’ve long known that every business has unique needs. That’s why we look to meet businesses where they are and offer solutions that address their individual requirements. This is especially apparent in our options for moving to Oracle Exadata Cloud.

In their upcoming webcast, Brent Juelich, Cloud Strategy and Business Development, and Mathew Steinberg, Senior Principal Product Manager, at Oracle will cover several options for moving Oracle Exadata to the cloud, including Oracle Gen 2 Exadata Cloud at Customer, Oracle Exadata Cloud Service, and Oracle Autonomous Database. Jeulich and Steinberg will explain how each solution offers businesses a different balance between automation and control, even allowing customers to use the public cloud behind their own firewall.

Sign up now to join Exadata Your Way: Deployment Options of the Leading Database Platform on Feb. 18 at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET.

Amanda O’Callaghan is an award-winning story specialist for Oracle Technology. She enjoys creating content that provides real solutions to people’s most pressing problems. Her work has also appeared on NPR, WSJ.com, and CBSInteractive.