Pros and Con of application appliances - CTO Coffee Chat 12
Transcript
nice cute answer from the CTO advisor calm with another periscope coffee chat that you know I'm doing a little bit of the hybrid this go-around i'm going to record the podcast and a proper podcast format while periscoping at the same time so we'll see how this goes we're going to talk about application appliances today I got into a really interesting conversation with a chat from Oracle uh talking about the advantages of kind of that Oracle full stack specifically feel done from Oracle he's a traditional son
guy that's moving to Oracle's a new organization after they require Sun and as a result Oracle has come up with a really interesting value prop of being able to offer a full stack been able to offer the application not just a application so if you're a legacy PeopleSoft customer you remember of course that Oracle acquired people's off and now between Oracle's legacy application business and PeopleSoft business Oracle offers a really compelling solution that can piece against the lights of sa psf force a full stack solution
so not just the application but you also get the database and now with the IP of Sun their offer they're able to offer a full stack of hardware as well so Sun based storage or Oracle's own IP when it comes to storage from other acquisitions Sun originally Sun compute the OS the application the database and then the kind of end result is that you get one throat to choke one number the call and life is good you know one of the disadvantages to that is that
your kind of locked in to that full stack we'll we'll talk about it in just a second Oracle isn't only provided to offer this HP has somewhat of it from a infrastructure perspective and SI p is coming to it from a different angle they're offering there sa p hana platform for the database part of sa p and then of course they have the essay p portion application portion as well so when you merge something like an HP capability with a.s.a.p software stack you end up coming
up with these applications appliances from OE OEM partnerships HP offers a.s.a.p hannah application appliance SI p isn't just partnering with HP fujitsu dale IBM all the major vendors OEM vendors offer a.s.a.p hannah appliance it's when you start to integrate these things into the data center where i started to kind of raise an eyebrow while from an application perspective and this is why application teams love them from application perspective you have the flexibility or the assurance that i have one throat to choke the solution will work
or at least is advertised to work with the application that I'm buying so from a enterprise data center perspective I wouldn't feel my whole data center with Oracle compute and other applications on top of it I would specifically use their Exadata or whatever the platform that I'm buying to service my oracle application same thing with SI p Hanna what you end up with if are these islands within your data center so here's the practical challenge that a data center operator specifically an enterprise were running to
i buy a oracle full stack solution or i'll buy ASAP om branded appliance for SI p handle i bring it into my data center if I may EMC shop a Dale shop now I have to manage compute and storage that's not my preferred vendor if I spent a lot of time standardizing on a specific platform I have to practically from a storage administration for network administration in some cases manage a solution that is not a standard within my data center so while the application folks may
be happy that they have one throat to choke I've moved the headache from the application space into the data center space I've run into this problem myself you know when SI p hannah first came out a few years ago the preferred method deploy was on an appliance so if I when it got an appliance from HP I get in I get it I get a rack of three parts storage I get a rack of HP Networking I get a rack of HP compute but if I'm
a cisco shop that uses EMC or HDS or hitachi you know HTS is a touching your net netapp storage now I have this foreign piece of transport and storage layer that I'm not accustomed to managing so from that perspective I lose some flexibility another pieces once you dedicate yourself to this full stack you're locked in more or less so when you think about your dr or cloud options you want to expand and this is specifically in the oracle case if i want to expand off site
or off premises to a cloud solution then i have to embrace the model that oracle dictates i don't i'm not sure if oracle has partnerships with other cloud providers and they have oracle branded hardware that can move to an Oracle cloud that's not a oracle branded solution meaning can i go with sabes and have my Exadata base cloud and sabes where I don't manage the actual hardware infrastructure I'm not talking about a Colo I'm talking about a cloud proper service where i'm consuming the service on
a cloud nature that's another not since I'm these cloud solutions I'm not too sure that Oracle's cloud solutions are a quote unquote true their clout light I you know what I'm not going to get in trouble Oracle and because they're a little bit aggressive I'll say that you have the option to go into Oracle cloud but don't expect the type of don't expect the type of kind of terms you'd normally expect like an AWS you're not going to get a month-by-month pay by the drink type
of uses these are going to be Oracle like terms you're going to have a minimum commitment that's not going to be six months it's not going to be a month by month it will be something when in which Oracle neat will be able to recoup their investment and standing up your environment in their cloud solution so you end up with lock in from me all intents and purposes you can't just take a reference architecture from two different vendors so so if I deploy Oracle's I will
traditionally I pick my storage hardware compute based on best of breed and let's say my primary data center I stand up my Oracle app certified ready to go and I'm run charging alone I decided to implement a dr solution and in my dr location i want to use a different best-of-breed reference at because it's a shared infrastructure this is where oracle kind of a will market it as an advantage to choose their converse platform and say you know what whether you're in your one premises solution
you're off premises solution or your dr location if you choose oracle hardware you have the reliability of and the lower risk of knowing that your solution will work as expected because you're working on a certified platform that's fully supported by oracle the flip side is that you're going to pay the expense of hosting that application you're going to pay for that reliability you're going to pay the premium to have your converged Oracle solution in your dr location as well as the rest of the solution to
support the rest of your enterprise so using that strategy you can't leverage commodity solutions to have kind of a cold standby you're going to pay the full premium that you would for a production solution so there's a pros and cons I'm not you know I'm not completely down on the application appliance perspective I think there's a lot of value and application appliances that peace of mind is great I think the considerations are if you're going to go with application appliance understand that the solution that you
picked may be foreign to your current data center standard and while you're lessening the headache of your application team you're increasing the complexity of your data center by injecting non-standard equipment in today's data center realistically you're going to have that problem you're going to hell appliances from other providers the only problem is when you think about these BCA's business-critical applications there could be a good portion of your footprint in your data center and that's a huge huge consideration that's it for this CTO chat site Chet
Chet side coffee chat I guess we'll call it a hybrid type of show I had fun with it you can find me on the twitters I'm SCT advisor on the twitters and then on the web with the th e I'm the CTO advisor com talk to you guys next episode you
