Cloud World Oracle Database 12c

    The purpose of the Oracle Database 12c technology forum, which was held in Moscow on March 22, 2016, was to highlight the main innovations in the field of corporate data storage and management. We were especially interested in the first section of the forum on cloud computing.




    Hybrid Cloud is here


    Hybrid Cloud Management Best Practices Prabaker Gonglour, Oracle Database 12c's senior director of business development at Oracle, began with an important point: a hybrid cloud is already a reality. What it is? This is a combination of private and public clouds, which implements cross-controlled use of data and applications between them. A hybrid cloud is very convenient for development and testing, integration of B2B solutions, implementation of products requiring IT resources, trial operation of new services.

    Of course, there is no single scenario for switching to a hybrid cloud for everyone. Some companies are looking for ways to optimize the cost of physical IT infrastructure and virtualize local resources, transferring them to a private cloud. Others systematically transfer resources to a private cloud in order to gradually translate them into a public cloud, while working on workflows at the virtualization level. Some companies simply transfer individual projects to the public cloud. All such cases are also characterized by a transition from capital investments to operating costs, which, for economic reasons, is now largely a requirement of the time.

    It is easy to highlight typical examples of hybrid cloud use in enterprises. Organizations that develop and test applications on an industrial scale - whether for their own needs or as their main activity - transfer the development and testing infrastructure to the public cloud, thereby significantly accelerating the deployment of these systems and optimizing their management, while business-critical applications they continue to use locally. For a number of organizations - for example, dependent on seasonal fluctuations in the market - the periodic transfer of load to the public cloud is a condition for the existence of a business, therefore, it is important for them to provide a dynamic load distribution on IT resources and a quick transition to the public cloud on demand. Another popular pattern is, for example,

    Of course, placing IT resources in a hybrid cloud makes sense only if the company can fully own and manage these resources. The cloud is the cloud when the provision of services, their administration and payment are automated. Companies with a large, complex IT infrastructure understand this especially well, because managing such infrastructures without automation is impossible. The provider of the relevant platforms and technologies is required to ensure the unification of the procedures for managing the private and public cloud; stable quality of service in a private and public cloud, as well as its compliance with regulations; transparency of public and private cloud management and user flows between them.

    But in this case, the use of a hybrid cloud is not an end in itself. In order for this technology to attract enterprises, it must ensure the optimization of resources - that is, the use of resources in a private and public cloud should be the most economical way to deploy them, and mechanisms for accurate calculation of requirements for private cloud infrastructure and public cloud platform services are required. A separate challenge is the possibility of dynamic load balancing between the private and public cloud.



    Oracle implements and provides its customers with a choice of all cloud models. And it is Enterprise Manager, starting with version 12cR5, that is a single management tool for local and cloud resources; it provides enterprises not only with a single view of local and cloud resources, but also the ability to transfer load to and from the Oracle Cloud (Fig. 1).

    Particularly impressive is that to ensure the quality of service for both private and public clouds, Oracle uses the same “Find – Fix – Validate” methodology, that is, “find – fix – check”, accurate and automatic (Fig. 2).



    At each of the three steps of the methodology, in both cases, the same basic software is used:
    1. Find: built-in self-diagnosis module - Automatic Database Diagnostics Monitor (ADDM): Oracle Diagnostics Pack;
    2. Fix (“fix”): automatic application tuning - Oracle Tuning Pack;
    3. Validate (“check”): planned application setup - Oracle Real Application Testing SPA.

    A new type of report, called the Performance Hub, graphically displays a database performance report generated on the basis of the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR report) diagnostic repository data in a convenient and visual graphical form (Fig. 3).



    A new feature of SQL Performance Analyzer, called SPA Quick Check, allows you to quickly evaluate the impact of planned system changes on the SQL load on the working system. It is designed for use on work systems, does not affect the operation of end users and creates a minimal additional load.

    Service quality assurance for private and public clouds is achieved by new features of Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c. Separately, we mention the Oracle Real Application Testing toolkit, which, in addition to testing infrastructure database changes, now also offers an integrated set of tools for comprehensive end-to-end database consolidation management Database Consolidation Workbench.

    Transferring the load from a private cloud to a public cloud should be performed without loss of service quality, and the management tools provided by the supplier should guarantee accurate capacity planning and the possibility of making changes when switching to the cloud. Oracle Enterprise Manager automates the movement of databases to the clouds in the following ways:
    • Cloning pluggable databases in Oracle Cloud for Oracle Database 12c
    • Cloning or migrating pluggable databases from Oracle Cloud to local container databases
    • cloning for development and testing scenarios - using data masking.

    Migrating a database to a private and public cloud usually involves significant infrastructure changes — hardware, storage, network, database version, etc. Oracle Real Application Testing helps you verify changes using your real workload and plan resources to reduce SLA risks and prevent a decrease in the quality of service.

    New Features in Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c


    Introducing Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c in more detail, Sergey Tomin, a leading consultant at the Oracle CIS technology consulting department, said that initially the three main goals in developing the previous version of Enterprise Manager 12c were: first, to give customers a complete solution for managing and monitoring corporate level (i.e., a solution that allows you to manage hundreds and thousands of objects), and secondly, to enable integrated management of the entire application stack and deep diagnostics from the application level to the level databases and disks with a transparent transition between levels, thirdly, the most important thing is to create a commercial solution for managing private clouds, the entire life cycle of the cloud - planning, deployment, testing, accounting for resource consumption and billing.

    Through the successful implementation of these features, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c has earned well-deserved recognition from users. The largest retail chain of convenience stores 7-Eleven uses Enterprise Manager to quickly deploy its mobile application infrastructure. Walgreens, the largest pharmacy chain, uses Enterprise Manager to monitor configurations, monitor compliance, and automate the use of patches — they now spend half the effort on these operations. Societe General Bank uses the new Enterprise Manager feature, thin cloning, to create thin clones of test databases and saves 90% of the time and disk space. Allied Irish Banks uses Replication Application Testing to test infrastructure database changes,

    Oracle Enterprise Manager is also used to manage the Oracle public cloud itself. For example, at the largest Cloud Public Oracle site, it manages 2.5 million monitoring units, controlling more than 25 thousand service instances, and processes 3.4 million events every day, performs 2 million tasks, 11 million test transactions.

    Enterprise Manager 13c provides a single interface for managing both public and private cloud. Enterprise Manager makes it easy to transfer database loads from the data center to the Oracle public cloud and vice versa.

    Providing self-service on-demand access to software and infrastructure with scalability and accounting for resource consumption, Enterprise Manager provides the following benefits.

    • Improving the quality of service. IT organizations strive not only to reduce costs, but also to find solutions to improve productivity, availability and security. Cloud customers benefit from the high availability features built into the cloud.
    • Flexibility in the use of resources. The ability to increase and decrease the processing power of the database makes applications flexible and easily adaptable to changing workloads.
    • Accelerated provision of databases. Databases in the cloud can be provided very quickly. This reduces the overall deployment time of production applications and development platforms and speeds up test configurations.
    • The ability to quantify the use of database resources in the cloud for budgeting, planning, and allocating administrative resources based on resource use.

    Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c offers a single window for managing hardware and software (first in the industry), a single view for private and public clouds, and simple diagnostics with the ability to go to different levels of the application stack.

    In addition, the solution automates the patching of all components of the Oracle Engineered Systems hardware and software systems, and the compliance management toolkit supports the STIG standard and offers a single compliance management window for local and cloud components, which allows you to configure and check compliance rules in real time.

    Among the new features of Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c is the management of configuration drift, that is, tracking changes in dynamic configurations of any scale — the source for comparison can be either a “living” object or a saved basic configuration.

    “Always on” monitoring allows you to receive e-mail notifications of critical events even during planned outages of the Enterprise Manager management server.

    A large number of Enterprise Manager agents have become easier to deploy and upgrade with golden images.

    The ability to manage middleware is critical for enterprise customers. Oracle Enterprise Manager supports multi-tenancy WebLogic 12.2, has built-in WebLogic Admin Console (Change Center, write WLST scripts, manage JDBC Data Source, configure domain, cluster, server, audit capabilities) and improved diagnostic functionality - Java Workload Explorer for deep JVM diagnostics and Middleware Diagnostics Advisor to detect known issues, including memory leaks, stuck threads, JDBC / JMS problems, etc.

    Oracle customers praise the new solution. So, Naoto Kashiwagi, head of the NEC Japan middleware and cloud team, and Yoki Moriyama, deputy general manager of the company, say: “Enterprise Manager is a powerful tool for managing our large systems that serve large transactions. . We use the Enterprise Manager to manage hundreds of objects so important that we cannot afford to miss a single warning, and we must efficiently service these systems without errors. ”

    New Oracle Cloud Services for IT Management



    Boris Pishchik, a leading consultant at the Oracle CIS Technology Consulting Department, spoke about Oracle's cloud-based platform for IT monitoring - Oracle Management Cloud.

    The Oracle Management Cloud solution is designed for IT operations and development services; it is based on the idea of ​​periodically, in real time, collecting various diagnostic information in real time, transferring it to the Oracle public cloud, consolidating, storing and providing it with a convenient user web interface. Key features of the solution:
    • End-user monitoring of web applications and infrastructure components, both on-premises and cloud-based.
    • Support capacity planning and resources.
    • Broad coverage for analyzing metrics and events.
    • Log collection, search, aggregation, understanding of topology.
    • Automated detection of anomalies.
    • Convenient user interface, control panels.

    The three main Oracle Management Cloud services — Application Performance Monitoring, Logs Analytics, and IT Analytics — are now available in the Oracle public cloud.

    Application Performance Monitoring provides diagnostics at various levels: from the end-user level to the infrastructure logs. The service constantly monitors applications to identify problems, timely warns of problems that may affect the work of users, and offers convenient means of finding the root causes of problems. Functionality offers a single interface for the operation of IT and developers and provides proactive monitoring of end-user experience, which is achieved by constantly monitoring the performance of web pages and AJAX, regular measurements of query performance and the ability to correlate user problems with bottlenecks in infrastructure performance.

    Log Analytics is a new cloud service designed to consolidate log files from various sources. Log Analytics provides real-time monitoring, aggregation, indexing, analysis, retrieval and correlation of all log data from applications and infrastructure components (local and cloud). For the analysis of journals, machine algorithms are used to recognize and group records based on common templates and quickly find the root causes of problems.
    The IT Analytics toolkit allows you to determine the patterns of functioning of the current IT landscape, identify problem areas and effectively plan capacity. Its main tasks: analysis of resources (identifying uneven loads, analysis of resource consumption in different sections and for different periods) and planning for their growth, performance analysis using built-in analytics to identify bottlenecks, resource-intensive SQL queries, etc. , visualization of the performance picture by types of resources and by key indicators.

    The result of the Oracle Management Cloud implementation is an increase in the quality of maintenance and operation. Also, the customer does not have to make investments in support and administration of these services, with the advent of Oracle Management Cloud it is no longer his responsibility.

    Oracle Hybrid Cloud in Detail



    A report by Dmitry Ermoshin, a leading consultant at the Oracle CIS Technology Consulting Department, was devoted to how Oracle's private and hybrid clouds can help you solve important IT services tasks such as:
    1. Rapid deployment of new databases.
    2. Cloning large databases.
    3. Reducing routine workloads, automating and speeding up cloud databases.
    4. Standardization.
    5. Consolidation.
    6. Detailed accounting of the use of computing resources.
    7. More efficient use of computing resources (including disks).
    8. Improving the reliability of existing databases.
    9. Building a flexible, scalable IT infrastructure.

    Oracle is investing heavily in cloud automation. If we look at the diagram of cloud solutions offered by major global suppliers (Fig. 4), it turns out that only Oracle provides a complete stack of cloud solutions, including HWaaS - equipment as a service.



    Oracle's approach is based on the concept of a hybrid cloud - a combination of private and public clouds, which implements cross-controlled use of data and applications between them. A hybrid cloud is very convenient for development and testing, integration of B2B solutions, implementation of products requiring IT resources, trial operation of new products.



    Oracle implements and provides its customers with a choice of all cloud models - public, private and hybrid cloud (Fig. 5). On the one hand, there are products on the basis of which you can deploy Oracle systems in the data center, turning them into a private cloud. On the other hand, there are Oracle data centers around the world that provide public cloud services. Oracle Enterprise Manager allows you to connect both approaches, connect one cloud to another and manage them using a single interface.

    The most popular Oracle cloud services now in the world and in Russia are platform services - a database as a service and an application server as a service.

    The two main ways to provide the “database as a service” service, that is, Oracle PaaS (DBaaS), are as follows: clients work either with Oracle VM virtual machines or with Exadata servers. If clients work with traditional virtual machines, there are several pre-configured sizes of virtual machines for them, which are characterized by a certain number of processors and memory size. The Exadata server-based solution is designed for customers with very high requirements for database size and performance. In addition, it makes it possible to use Exadata cells for high loads.

    On demand, the database is ordered from the self-service portal in the required version, configuration, and with the required degree of consolidation (Fig. 6). Only an Enterprise Manager is required to create an Oracle cloud. New equipment, new settings, a new approach to the access control system or to workstations are not required. Enterprise Manager is configured for DBaaS database pools, WebLogic pools, or virtualization pools. The Oracle private cloud can then be used to connect to external systems.



    The rapid deployment of new databases is possible thanks to the convenient self-service portal and template catalog, which stores a set of deployment procedures in the form of service templates and offers different template options for different versions of the DBMS, configurations, etc. The Database Provisioning procedure allows you to capture database configurations and save deployment procedures for future use.

    The new Snap Clone database cloning process uses advanced storage capabilities and can be implemented in hardware or software. And if traditional database cloning takes an average of one and a half weeks, then a solution that performs automated cloning allows you to receive databases of several terabytes per hour.

    To manage the hybrid cloud, Enterprise Manager version 12c R5 and 13c contains a Hybrid Agent that must be installed in the cloud service. After installation, the Hybrid Agent will begin to interact with Enterprise Manager, transmitting information about the cloud system.

    The cited reports are far from exhausting the entire topic of the next Oracle Database 12c technology forum. We want to end this review with a reminder that Prabaker Gonglour made in his report - that many IT departments are already building combined infrastructure, using both private and public clouds, and already understand that they are obliged to manage resources - where whatever they are. Therefore, they try to build their own private clouds in accordance with similar architectural and operational requirements - or trust those cloud resource providers that meet the requirements of scalability, performance, monitoring, security and regulations. The positive experience of companies that have become customers of Oracle Cloud suggests that they have chosen the right supplier.

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