How The Oracle Database Appliance Can Help Your Company Work Better

The Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) is a powerful and affordable solution for any company that is interested in taking advantage of an engineered system, aimed at providing the best performance for an Oracle database. The Oracle database can run in a “bare metal” configuration, or it can run in a virtualized mode.

In the virtualized mode, the database runs in a special Virtual Machine (VM), and you can configure your own VMs to run in the ODA alongside the special database VM. The database VM has guaranteed I/O and processor resources to guarantee that the database will continue to perform optimally even if one of your VMs starts consuming additional server resources.

Emerald Associates has successfully deployed the ODA to major players in the Oil and Gas industry. Taking advantage of the virtualization platform, we have deployed VMs that run within the database appliance and make use of its ASM storage. The ODA has two server nodes, and each VM runs in one node at a time. If one of the nodes fails for any reason, the VM can be started on the remaining node since it is hosted in the shared storage space. Additionally, the VMs can use the NFS shares in the ZFS Storage Appliance for additional storage space.

Since the ODA has so many processors and memory, there is plenty to assign to the virtual machines. And because the database VM has guaranteed I/O and processor resources, you have peace of mind that your user VMs will not impact the database performance. Emerald Associates has successfully deployed Oracle Linux VMs running application servers in the ODA, with great performance benefits. It is an ideal solution for someone who needs a database server and who also needs to host several applications that use the hosted database. For more information about running applications on the ODA please take a look at our Primavera-In-A-Box solution.

Hosting VMs on the ODA also cuts infrastructure cost, since it won’t be necessary to purchase additional hardware just for that purpose. The ODA can run a number of operating systems, and Oracle has made available several different VM templates that can be used to have your VM up and going in no time. There are templates for clustered Weblogic, for EM, and there is also an Oracle Enterprise Linux 6 template that is great for basically anything.

For these reasons, the ODA is a great resource not only to host your database server, but also to host the VMs that will make use of the database on the ODA.

For more information on Oracle Engineered Systems and Emerald In-A-Box solutions, please visit our product pages or contact us.