Modernize IT with SPARC Servers and Application ... - Oracle

Modernize IT with Oracle SPARC Servers and Oracle’s Application Engineered Storage ORACLE WHITE PAPER

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DECEMBER 2014

Table of Contents Executive Summary

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Factors Driving Modernization Upgrading Just the Servers Is Not Enough

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Simplify IT Consolidation and Virtualization Simplified Management Additional Efficiencies When Using Oracle Storage and Oracle Database Together

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Increase Service Levels Performance and Availability Optimizations in SPARC Servers and Oracle Solaris Oracle Solaris Enterprise Availability Features that Help Increase Service Levels Storage Performance Optimizations for Oracle Database Performance Benchmarks

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Reduce Cost and Risk Operational Savings from Oracle’s Integrated Stack Additional 6x to 15x Storage Capacity Savings with Oracle Database Pay for It with the Savings Reduce Risk with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services Single Point of Contact for Support

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Support for Cloud and Traditional IT 8

Built-in, No Cost Virtualization 8

Oracle Solaris Features for Advanced Virtualization and Agile, Compliant Application

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Deployment Oracle Virtual Networking 9

Live Migration Capabilities 9

Enterprise OpenStack Distribution 10

Cloud Security 11

Storage Domains for Consolidated Cloud Storage 11

Cloud Management 11

Conclusion Learn More

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Executive Summary A modernized IT infrastructure not only enables better performance and reliability for business-critical applications but also provides an agile foundation so that new IT services can be rolled out quickly to meet today’s fast changing business demands. While it may be tempting to just upgrade the servers, increasing service levels for applications requires that storage and networking I/O throughput keep pace with the modernized servers. A holistic approach to modernization includes a review of the storage and networking infrastructure along with the server infrastructure. Oracle’s new SPARC T-Series and M6-32 servers combined with Oracle’s application engineered storage can help IT organizations deliver more value in the following ways: » Simplify IT — Oracle’s co-engineered hardware and software stack simplifies consolidation and management, and enables IT organizations to focus on priority tasks that can drive real business value instead of assembling products from a variety of vendors. » Increase service levels — Oracle SPARC servers and Oracle storage are designed for enterprise availability and have demonstrated world-record performance and price/performance in numerous industry benchmarks. Together, they offer unbeatable performance for Oracle Database. » Reduce cost and risk — An Oracle Financing payment solution enables new systems to be purchased for up to 20 percent less than current support payments for legacy servers. No up front capital costs, optional consulting services, and consolidation ratios of up to 90 percent make for an easy decision to modernize with new SPARC servers. » Support for cloud and traditional IT —SPARC T-Series and M6-32 servers combined with Oracle Solaris and Oracle storage can prepare the IT environment for cloud service delivery. Oracle’s coengineered hardware and software stack includes many enterprise availability technologies as well as virtualization and management tools that make it easy to create and manage cloud services.

This white paper describes the major benefits of the latest generation of Oracle SPARC servers and Oracle storage systems and explains why deploying Oracle SPARC servers along with Oracle’s application engineered storage platforms can help organizations deliver higher service levels while reducing cost and risk as well as laying the groundwork for a private cloud.

Factors Driving Modernization In spite of cost pressures, IT organizations are investing in modernization programs and many find this to be critical to business success. Rapidly changing business demands and large round-the-clock audiences mean that IT infrastructures must be agile while also providing 24x7 access with high service levels. Modernization can also be a driver for new growth opportunities. New systems can sometimes provide such dramatic gains in performance that it’s possible to address new business opportunities that were previously unreachable.

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The following are common factors driving IT organizations to modernize their aging infrastructures: » Increasing complexity Server and storage sprawl along with the compounding effect of managing thousands of virtual machines creates complexity and inefficiency in IT operations. Some organizations are even pushing the limits of the cooling and power resources in their data centers. Consolidation and modernization are seen as the means to increase compute power in a smaller footprint while also increasing efficiency and driving down operating costs. At the same time, security awareness has moved from the basement to the boardroom, so there is a stronger need to analyze and demonstrate compliance in spite of today’s complexity. » Rapidly changing demands Aging systems are simply not flexible enough to enable rapid response to changing business needs or to scale quickly when user loads grow unexpectedly fast. Consolidated infrastructures and cloud services can provide the means to simplify IT and enable greater agility. » Application performance Growth in users, data, and transaction volumes often slows application performance over time. Servers and storage must be updated regularly just to keep pace with growing business needs. Perhaps more importantly, newer systems can sometimes offer so much better performance that a completely new IT strategy is possible. » More stringent SLAs Meeting the increasingly stringent service level requirements of today’s modern Web applications becomes very challenging with aging systems. In addition to faster performance, modern server and storage systems offer impeccable reliability and serviceability compared to legacy systems. » Exponential data growth Corporate data has grown exponentially and so has the cost of maintaining and managing storage for it. Data growth is forcing IT managers to consider new storage platforms that offer greater performance and efficiency. » Service and support costs Increasing service, support, or maintenance fees associated with aging servers can drive up operating costs to the point where much of the IT budget is directed toward simply keeping the lights on. Modern systems can be maintained at much lower cost, in part because fewer systems are required to handle the same workloads. This enables more of the IT budget to be applied toward building innovative new services that can drive business growth.

Upgrading Just the Servers Is Not Enough Upgrading the server infrastructure alone is often not sufficient to significantly enhance application performance and drive greater agility. Higher performing servers can be starved by legacy storage systems that cannot keep up with the faster server I/O throughput. To maximize application performance and data center efficiency, it’s important to modernize the server and storage infrastructure together. Another important consideration is the network infrastructure. An analysis of overall I/O throughput requirements might indicate that the network infrastructure is also due for an upgrade.

Simplify IT Only Oracle offers co-engineered products that span every layer of the enterprise IT stack from applications and middleware to servers and storage. Whether deploying third party software on Oracle systems or running Oracle Applications and Oracle Database on an all Oracle stack, IT organizations can take advantage of optimizations that will make their applications run faster and more reliably. The combination of Oracle SPARC systems, Oracle Solaris, and Oracle storage represents an integrated infrastructure that has been designed and tested to deliver maximum performance and reliability for enterprise applications. Not only are the components designed to run well together but they also simplify IT by providing integrated virtualization capabilities and ease of management.

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As core building blocks within Oracle SuperCluster, Oracle SPARC servers and Oracle storage systems also benefit from the many hardware and software optimizations that are designed into the architecture of Oracle SuperCluster. For example, firmware modifications in the storage cells within Oracle SuperCluster were implemented to enhance storage performance as well as improve reliability and scalability. These storage firmware modifications are now providing similar capabilities in Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances. Similarly, performance optimizations in Oracle Solaris and SPARC servers that originated in Oracle SuperCluster are now designed into the standard releases of Oracle Solaris and the SPARC server family. These types of optimizations simplify IT by reducing the need for IT administrators to spend time tweaking server and storage configuration parameters to increase performance. The components are already designed to perform well together and the fact that they are already proven to work together reduces the likelihood of problems in a production environment.

Consolidation and Virtualization Consolidation and virtualization are important ways to reduce IT complexity and improve system utilization, which also lowers costs. Oracle’s SPARC T-Series and M6-32 servers include advanced virtualization with Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM Server for SPARC, enabling IT organizations to take advantage of the extreme performance and scalability of the SPARC servers. The most significant way that consolidation simplifies IT is by reducing the number of systems to manage. Oracle SPARC T-Series and M6-32 servers are based on the SPARC T5 and SPARC M6 processors respectively, both of which are much faster than the chips used in legacy servers. It’s not uncommon to achieve a 20:1 consolidation ratio where 20 legacy servers are replaced by a single SPARC T5-8 server with 8 CPUs and 128 cores. In many cases, the application workloads of each legacy server are simply migrated to their own VM in the new server where they can run in an isolated environment yet share the same OS instance to simplify administration and licensing. The combination of Oracle Solaris Zones, Oracle VM for SPARC, and physical domains (PDoms) in Oracle’s high-end systems portfolio provides a feature rich virtualization environment to enable extreme administrative efficiency for almost any type of workload. In addition, both Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM for SPARC are recognized as license boundaries by most enterprise software vendors, resulting in significant cost savings for application licensing. Network and I/O virtualization in Oracle Solaris also enables administrators to assign I/O bandwidth to virtualized network links. Further discussion of I/O virtualization and other hardware and software features that support consolidation can be found in the later section titled, “Support for Cloud and Traditional IT.”

Simplified Management There are a number of tools and capabilities across the entire Oracle stack that make it easier and less costly to manage. The entire Oracle stack can be managed through Oracle Enterprise Manager, which provides complete visibility and control for provisioning and managing the hardware and software components of the infrastructure, including the virtualization environment. One of the key ways that Oracle Enterprise Manager helps simplify IT is by providing tools that make it easy to provision new IT services. IT services or cloud services can now be brought online very quickly. Further information about Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is provided in the section called, “Support for Cloud and Traditional IT.” ®

For customers moving to Oracle Solaris from other UNIX or Linux environments, the migration is easy and the management environment will be familiar. Oracle Solaris supports management interfaces such as OpenStack,

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Puppet, and Chef, allowing enterprises to leverage advanced Oracle Solaris features to increase administrative efficiency without being required to discard familiar management tools. For environments that include Oracle Database, storage management is further simplified by automation offered through Oracle Automatic Storage Management and Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol. Oracle Automatic Storage Management is an integrated, high-performance database file system and disk manager that simplifies management of block-based storage such as database tables. Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol is a communications protocol for communicating between Oracle Database 12c and Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances. It sends critical metadata to the storage system to inform it about the incoming database data. The storage system can then dynamically setup and tune itself, on the fly, to optimize for the precise needs of the incoming data. By using Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol, manual tuning is reduced by up to 65 percent.

Additional Efficiencies When Using Oracle Storage and Oracle Database Together In addition to simplifying management, running Oracle Database with Oracle storage can take advantage of storage efficiencies and thus reduce storage capacity requirements. Only Oracle storage systems enable “database aware” compression through the innovative Hybrid Columnar Compression and Automatic Data Optimization, a feature of Advanced Compression Option. While storage costs are an obvious tangible benefit of compression, compression can also reduce resource requirements for all components of the IT infrastructure, including memory, backup media and network bandwidth. This is accomplished because data is utilized in compressed format throughout the entire suite of Oracle hardware and software components that are used with Oracle Database. There is also less storage to manage because of the high compression ratios achievable with Oracle storage platforms. Smaller files, fewer LUNS, and shorter backups mean that administrators have less work to do to manage the environment. In addition, Automatic Data Optimization works with Hybrid Columnar Compression to enforce data compression and manage data lifecycle by moving it to different tiers as data ages. The result is that both DBAs and storage administrators can manage a greater number of Oracle Databases and storage systems, allowing implementations to keep growing without the need to grow administrator resources at the same pace. In addition, since data is transferred between server and storage systems in native compressed format, there is less data to move during query requests, so response time is much faster.

Increase Service Levels Oracle’s SPARC systems running Oracle Solaris provide a highly scalable platform for delivering high performance and availability for business workloads. Increased performance can enable completely new ways of performing business functions. Line of business functions such as finance, procurement, HR, customer care, manufacturing, sales, and marketing are able to change the way they deliver services to their clients. Higher performance also translates into new levels of scalability that let applications support more concurrent users.

Performance and Availability Optimizations in SPARC Servers and Oracle Solaris The superior performance demonstrated by SPARC servers and Oracle Solaris is the result of more than 20 years of development and optimization in Oracle’s hardware and software stack. Oracle’s SPARC servers are the culmination of engineering advancements over many generations of enterprise servers, offering large memory configurations and balanced I/O bandwidth to match the scalability of the SPARC processor.

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Oracle Solaris has been continuously improved over the last two decades to enhance both reliability and scalability. This has enabled Oracle SPARC systems to continue driving performance leadership as processor count and memory capacity continues to increase. Recent scalability enhancements in Oracle Solaris have included critical thread technology, which enables key database threads and transactions to be executed faster on the SPARC processor. Further optimizations have also been made to the memory management subsystem and the cryptographic framework. Optimizations to support faster database maintenance and recovery have also been implemented throughout the stack. Oracle’s SPARC systems now have the ability to shut down and start up databases eight times faster than previously possible.

Oracle Solaris Enterprise Availability Features that Help Increase Service Levels Some of the key enterprise availability features in Oracle Solaris that help drive service uptime include: » Predictive Self Healing — Oracle Solaris Predictive Self Healing automatically diagnoses, isolates, and recovers from faults. » Fault Management Architecture (FMA) — The Oracle Solaris Fault Management Architecture automatically and silently detects and diagnoses underlying hardware problems using an extensible set of agents. When a faulty hardware component is discovered, the self healing capability automatically responds by taking the faulty component offline. » Service Management Facility (SMF) — Oracle Solaris 11 provides the ability to recover very quickly after errors with Oracle Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF). » Oracle Solaris Cluster — Oracle Solaris Cluster is designed to quickly and accurately detect and provide fully orchestrated recovery of application outages by replicating physically or virtually deployed services locally or in multiple geographical locations. » Oracle Solaris DTrace — Oracle Solaris DTrace provides detailed visibility into live systems so that developers and administrators can untangle the thorniest problems, including eliminating performance bottlenecks — all without impacting application uptime.

Storage Performance Optimizations for Oracle Database When used together with Oracle storage, the performance of SPARC servers can be further enhanced by storage optimizations that make Oracle Database run faster. Oracle’s optimized storage platforms have been engineered to work together with Oracle Database and Oracle Applications to optimize overall system and application performance in addition to reducing costs through storage efficiency.

Performance Benchmarks Recent performance benchmarks demonstrate to the industry the leadership position of SPARC servers and Oracle storage: » World record on Oracle Applications benchmarks Oracle's SPARC M6-32 server set world records on three different Oracle Applications benchmarks running 1 simultaneously. It is the first server to achieve this level of performance while running these three separate

benchmarks simultaneously.

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Oracle's SPARC M6-32 server running Oracle Database 11g Release 2 on Oracle Solaris 11 set world records on Oracle's PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) 9.1, PeopleSoft 9.1 Payroll (North America), and Oracle E-Business Suite R12.1.3 Standard Extra-Large benchmarks. Results as of April 23, 2014. Visit http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performancescalability/sparc-m6-32-world-record-2020359.html for more details.

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» World record two-tier result for 32 processors on the SAP Standard Application Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark Oracle's SPARC M6-32 server produced a world record two-tier result for 32 processors on the SAP Standard Application Sales and Distribution (SD) Benchmark, beating out the two-tier results of the IBM Power 795 32-chip 2 system SAP Standard Application SD Benchmark. » World record query performance Oracle's SPARC T5-8 server delivered world record query performance along with near real-time analytics using Oracle OLAP. The SPARC T5-8 server provided greater query per hour performance throughput and supported 3 more concurrent OLAP users than an eight-chip server based on the Intel Xeon Processor E7-8870. » World record single-server SPECjEnterprise2010 result Oracle produced a world record SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark result of 57,422.17 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS using Oracle's SPARC T5-8 servers for both the application tier and database tier. The results demonstrate 3.4 times better performance compared to the eight-chip IBM Power 780 result of 16,646.34 4 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS.

Figure 1. SPARC T5-8 server provided 3.4 times better performance compared to the eight-chip IBM Power 780+ on the singleserver SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark.

» World Record SPC-2 Performance Results (Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3-4) The Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3-4 delivered the best overall performance result to date on the SPC-2 benchmark with a world record 17,244.22 SPC-2 MBPS™, while also delivering the second best current SPC-2 PricePerformance score of $22.53. This demonstrates the ability of the Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3-4 to simultaneously 5 deliver both extreme performance and unprecedented value to customers. » Best overall SPC-2 Price-Performance (Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3-2) Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3-2 achieved the best overall SPC-2 Price-Performance of any SPC-2 or SPC-2/E benchmark result to date, delivering 16,212.66 SPC-2 MBPS and setting a world record $12.08 per SPC-2 MBPS. The results demonstrate more than two times better performance compared to the IBM XIV Storage 6 System result of 7,467.99 SPC-2 MBPS.

2 Benchmarks executed using SAP enhancement package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0. Results as of Wednesday March 26, 2014. See

http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-scalability/sparc-m6-32-best-32-chip-2182583.html for more details.

3 Tests used Oracle OLAP Perf Version 3 workload running Oracle Database 12c on Oracle Solaris 11. Results as of September

22, 2013. Visit http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-scalability/sparc-t5-8-olap-2016065.html for more details.

4 Results as of March 26, 2013. Visit http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-scalability/sparc-t5-8-specjenterprise20101925020.html for more details.

5 Results as of September 10, 2013. Visit http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-scalability/spc-2-zs3-4-bmark2005937.html for more details.

6 Results as of June 25, 2014. Visit http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-scalability/zs3-2-spc-results-bm2222746.html for more details.

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Reduce Cost and Risk SPARC servers offer linear scalability and can often consolidate workloads from 10 or more legacy servers. This can dramatically reduce data center space and energy costs because the modernized infrastructure may contain up to 90 percent fewer servers. The simplified landscape is also much easier to manage, so total cost of ownership (TCO) can be up to 50 percent better.

Operational Savings from Oracle’s Integrated Stack Oracle's focus on building an integrated software and hardware stack from applications to disk means reduced risk for organizations that deploy multiple components of the stack. The entire stack has been tested and tuned to work together, enabling IT organizations to avoid the snags and delays that often occur in getting a multi-vendor environment up and running. It also makes it easier to maintain high service levels because the systems work together reliably. Faster deployment and enhanced reliability can also result in cost savings due to reduced labor. Oracle’s no-cost virtualization technologies can also provide significant cost savings through software license savings and simplified management. A major telecommunications customer estimates they are saving at least $500 in provisioning costs for each VM deployed in their enterprise. With roughly 40,000 VMs in their infrastructure this can result in more than $20 million in savings.

Additional 6x to 15x Storage Capacity Savings with Oracle Database Oracle's optimized storage platforms enable organizations to purchase less storage capacity because Oracle Database tables are stored and maintained in compressed formats. The use of Hybrid Columnar Compression typically results in a 6x to 15x storage capacity savings for the compressed tables and often yields total storage capacity savings of 40 percent or more compared to competitive storage platforms.

Pay for It with the Savings Delaying a modernization effort can allow more agile competitors to gain a competitive edge. Oracle Financing payment solutions can help IT organizations acquire and implement modernized IT systems when they are needed rather than delaying due to limitations in capital budgets. The monthly payment for new systems can be up to 20 percent less than what is already being spent in support fees. The flat payment plan over four years gives IT managers the ability to purchase all of the tools and services needed with no upfront costs. The financing solution bundles the cost of new server hardware with a support contract, migration services, and implementation services for setting up the virtualization environment. It also includes basic training on Oracle’s Solaris 11, Oracle VM, and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center so that administrators can be proficient with the tools that will help them maximize the benefits of consolidating on newer SPARC servers.

Reduce Risk with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services Reduce risk by leveraging Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services for a fast, yet comprehensive approach to refreshing server and storage technology. Based on proven methodologies and repeatable processes, these services can help optimally configure the server and storage environments as well as streamline the migration process. The services address the full implementation lifecycle from design through deployment and go-live support. Whether moving from previous generation SPARC servers or legacy platforms from another vendor, Oracle Consulting and Advanced Support Services teams can collaborate with in-house IT teams to migrate the aging infrastructure to the latest Oracle technologies. Leveraging the help of experienced Oracle service professionals not

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only reduces risk but also reduces the need for support from in-house IT staff, enabling them to stay focused on other high priority tasks.

Single Point of Contact for Support Another big benefit of running Oracle SPARC systems with Oracle storage and Oracle software is the single point of contact for support. One phone call to Oracle brings technical support for the entire stack, including Oracle Applications, Oracle Database, Oracle Solaris, the server hardware, and the storage environment. This translates to reduced risk for the business and can help streamline IT operations by eliminating the need to trace issues to a specific system before calling for support.

Support for Cloud and Traditional IT Modernizing an IT infrastructure with SPARC servers, Oracle Solaris, and Oracle storage prepares the environment for cloud service delivery. Oracle’s integrated hardware and software stack includes many enterprise availability technologies as well as virtualization and management tools that make it easy to create and manage cloud services. All of the cloud features described in the following subsections help increase agility by enabling IT organizations to deploy applications faster and spend less time configuring and optimizing systems to adapt to the workload requirements. Valuable IT resources are thus freed up to focus on innovation and responding to new business opportunities.

Built-in, No Cost Virtualization Oracle has a number of advanced virtualization technologies that operate at different layers of the stack and enable IT organizations to increase consolidation density and take advantage of the extreme performance and scalability of modern SPARC servers. » Physical domains (PDoms) — Oracle’s SPARC M6-32 servers provide the capability to divide a large server into a number of smaller ones by physically segregating the CPU, memory, and I/O resources into a number of PDoms. Each PDom behaves just like a physical server. » Oracle VM Server for SPARC logical domains (LDoms) — All current SPARC servers can be divided into a number of smaller systems by logically segregating CPU and memory resources and providing either native or virtualized I/O to domains. This adds an additional layer of granularity, and also has the advantage of allowing dynamic reallocation of CPU and memory resources among the LDoms. » Oracle Solaris Zones — Oracle Solaris runs in every LDom or PDom and includes a feature called Oracle Solaris Zones, which provides the ability to create a number of virtualized zones in the same OS instance. Oracle Solaris Zones technology provides the finest-grained allocation of resources and allows enterprise workloads to be run within a virtual environment at no performance cost, as if they were run in a bare-metal environment.

Oracle Solaris Features for Advanced Virtualization and Agile, Compliant Application Deployment Oracle Solaris Zones provides a highly integrated and capable virtualization offering that has been used in production for more than a decade. Its bare-metal performance makes it possible to create hundreds, or even thousands, of zones on a single system. In stark contrast, the leading virtualization technology introduces significant overhead — essentially imparting a 25 percent virtualization tax. This means that a greater number of systems will be required to compensate for the higher latencies that are introduced. The following advanced features in Oracle Solaris help increase performance and agility while greatly simplifying application deployment and management: » Network virtualization Oracle Solaris 11 provides a built-in distributed virtual network infrastructure called Oracle Solaris Elastic Virtual

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Switch. This feature virtualizes network traffic on a single machine or a completely distributed set of machines across an arbitrary geographic region. An entire data center network topology can be created within a single OS instance, and multi-system interconnects can be created at less cost using “dumb” network switches. In addition, changes to the network topology can then be accomplished without touching physical cables. Oracle Solaris 11 is designed in conjunction with higher levels of the Oracle stack such as Oracle Database and Java to deliver application-driven service level agreements (SLAs) via software-defined networking. Applications can set bandwidth limits or priorities, giving critical network traffic such as heartbeats a higher priority and thus improving system uptime. » Immutable Zones Oracle Solaris 11 allows Immutable Zones, which provides an additional level of security by making the zones read-only, and thus immune to malicious configuration changes or root-kit type of attacks. Once an application environment has been developed, tested and certified, it can be securely deployed and locked down for production use with Immutable Oracle Solaris Zones. Ensuring that applications are not compromised and always compliant is critical when deploying thousands of VMs in a cloud environment. » Unified Archives Unified Archives enable rapid cloning of application environments across virtualized and bare-metal environments. They can enable applications to be deployed twice as fast as leading Linux platforms. Administrators create archives from a deployed Oracle Solaris instance. If there are Oracle Solaris Zones installed within the OS instance, the zones can be included or excluded as desired. A Unified Archive can be created for a VM or a bare-metal system. The resulting agile infrastructure allows zones and VMs to be deployed or redeployed very quickly.

Oracle Virtual Networking Traditional data center networks are rigid and hierarchical because server, storage, and network connectivity is constrained by the network’s physical cabling and switch topology. Oracle Virtual Networking employs virtualization to simplify the infrastructure and make it more agile. Referred to as Software Defined Networking (SDN), this architecture makes the data center more agile and far more cost-effective to manage. The time to provision new applications decreases from days to minutes. In addition, network capacity can be added to running applications without service disruption. Administrators can connect servers to networks and storage using a converged network fabric that makes it possible to provision each server or storage device with a single physical connection to the virtualized, high-performance fabric. The physical network infrastructure can thus be entirely decoupled and virtualized network resources can be allocated and re-allocated dynamically through a unified software control plane. This leads to lower hardware costs, greater network density and more flexible resource control. Oracle Fabric Interconnect is the physical hardware device that provides the I/O virtualization services. It connects servers to Ethernet networks and storage through high-speed, low latency InfiniBand at 40 Gbps per line (80 Gbps for dual lines). Operating systems, hypervisors, and applications see the virtual I/O resources in the same way they see their physical counterparts. Oracle Fabric Manager software enables administrators to manage the provisioning and configuration of I/O paths for connected servers and storage devices. Administrators can also monitor and report on aggregate performance using Oracle Fabric Monitor plug-in.

Live Migration Capabilities Oracle VM Server for SPARC allows administrators to migrate an active domain from one system to another system while the domain continues to run. The migration uses SSL to encrypt logical domain memory structures as they are securely transferred over the network.

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Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center can also be used to migrate an Oracle Solaris Zone to a different physical server. However, this requires the zone to be shutdown for migration, so it’s not a live migration.

Enterprise OpenStack Distribution Oracle Solaris 11 includes a full distribution of OpenStack, the popular open source project that provides a cloud management infrastructure. Provided as a standard, supported part of the Oracle Solaris platform, OpenStack delivers a seamless, enterprise-class experience for managing compute, storage, and network resources in the data center through a centralized web-based portal. The combination of OpenStack and Oracle Solaris enables organizations to securely deliver cloud services in minutes rather than weeks or months. OpenStack is deeply integrated with key features of Oracle Solaris so that OpenStack on Oracle Solaris makes use of underlying Oracle Solaris capabilities to configure, deploy, manage and protect cloud services. Figure 2 illustrates how some of the existing OpenStack integrations leverage key Oracle Solaris features. For example, Cinder and Swift utilize the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system and Nova makes use of Oracle Solaris Zones for virtualization.

Figure 2. OpenStack is integrated with some of the advanced capabilities in Oracle Solaris.

A full OpenStack based cloud can be up and running in less than 10 minutes on Oracle Solaris 11 using a preconfigured Unified Archive image that has all the OpenStack services included in it. As soon as the Unified Archive image is deployed, it’s ready to run application services. OpenStack is able to take full advantage of all the benefits of Oracle Solaris virtualization features and it supports full failsafe rollback if necessary. Oracle customers are already demonstrating the benefits of using OpenStack and the new Unified Archive capability on Oracle Solaris to simplify lifecycle management. A US financial customer expects to achieve a 16X efficiency gain by enabling each administrator to manage up to 4,000 VMs.

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Figure 3. A major financial customer now expects to run 4,000 VMs per administrator.

Cloud Security Oracle Solaris, Oracle SPARC servers, and Oracle storage are all engineered to provide cloud security at every level of the stack. The combination of Oracle Solaris encryption framework and hardware-assisted cryptographic acceleration available on Oracle's SPARC systems makes it possible for applications to protect their data without affecting performance. Oracle Solaris 11 offers a sophisticated network-wide security system that protects system resources and controls how users access system resources, data, and privileges. Its unique user and process rights management technology helps reduce risks by granting users and applications only the minimum capabilities needed to perform their duties. The Oracle Solaris "Secure by Default" approach to network services starts with no externally enabled services other than the secure shell. System administrators can then enable only the services necessary for each system, significantly reducing exposure to remote attacks. Lastly, unlike other solutions, Oracle Solaris 11 requires no application changes to take advantage of these security enhancements.

Storage Domains for Consolidated Cloud Storage The Oracle FS1-2 flash storage system supports multiple, virtual storage systems within a single storage system. Each storage domain is a “data container” that isolates data from other storage domains, providing independence in multitenancy environments for private or public cloud deployments, regulatory compliance requirements, or chargeback models. Storage domains in the Oracle FS1-2 flash storage system also enable administrators to custom-tailor the QoS settings for each domain using Oracle’s patented storage quality-of-service technology.

Cloud Management Oracle also offers a complete cloud lifecycle management solution with Oracle Enterprise Manager, which enables administrators to quickly set up, manage, and support enterprise clouds as well as traditional Oracle IT environments. In addition to provisioning application or database services, administrators can use Oracle Enterprise Manager to quickly build a self-service interface so that users can provision their own instances of pre-configured IT services. Optional plug-ins for Oracle Enterprise Manager also provide complete visibility and control for provisioning and managing detailed hardware and software components of the infrastructure, including many third party components. This gives administrators a single integrated view of the entire cloud infrastructure.

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Conclusion Modernizing the server and storage infrastructure is imperative to address key business issues such as improving

agility and increasing revenue and margins. Oracle’s integrated stack from applications to disk is designed to help

organizations:

» Simplify IT through integrated offerings and easier management.

» Increase service levels with an optimized and proven hardware and software stack.

» Reduce cost and risk through optimization and integration.

» Support cloud computing with the latest technologies.

Learn More For more information about Oracle SPARC servers and Oracle storage systems, call +1.800.ORACLE1 to speak to an Oracle representative or visit the web resources in Table 1.

T A B L E 1. WEB R ESOU R C ES F OR F U R T H ER I N F OR MA T I ON Product Web Pages Oracle SPARC system

http://oracle.com/sparc

Oracle storage and tape systems

http://oracle.com/storage

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/enterprise-manager/index.html

Oracle Solaris 11

http://oracle.com/solaris

White Papers, Technical Articles, and eBooks The SPARC Difference: Reduce Risks, Cut Costs, Power Innovation (eBook)

http://oracle.com.edgesuite.net/ebook/sparcdiff/

Making the Right Hybrid Storage Array Buying Decision (DCIG Report)

https://go.oracle.com/LP=1427?elqCampaignId=3753

Oracle’s SPARC M5-32 and SPARC M6-32 Servers: Domaining Best Practices (white paper)

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/sun-sparcenterprise/documentation/o13-056-m5-domaining-1991544.pdf

Consolidation Using Oracle’s SPARC Virtualization Technologies (white paper)

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/sun-sparcenterprise/technologies/consolidate-sparc-virtualization-2301718.pdf

How to Consolidate Zones Storage on an Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance (OTN article)

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/howto-con2245308.html

12 | MODERNIZE IT WITH ORACLE SPARC SERVERS AND ORACLE’S APPLICATION ENGINEERED STORAGE

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