My EMC colleagues and I often advise IT leaders to begin their own Private Cloud journey by virtualizing everything. That includes “Tier One” applications. When IT people hear “Tier One,” a few brands immediately pop into our heads. When I describe how EMC’s internal IT organization is aggressively building a Private Cloud, I’m not surprised when asked, “What about Oracle?”
What you may not know is that EMC is one of Oracle’s largest customers with over 40,000 employees generating 22 million transactions every day. EMC IT has already consolidated and virtualized around 500 servers running a mix of Oracle’s database, apps, middleware, and related products.
Over the course of a year, EMC IT estimates virtualization has reduced costs by 82 percent, thanks to savings in server hardware, power and cooling, rack space, and floorspace. And Oracle projects are completed months sooner because virtual servers can be provisioned much faster than physical machines.
Our IT team didn’t stop there, however. Oracle databases themselves were rationalized and merged. Twenty-one data warehouse servers based on legacy Unix were consolidated down to eleven virtual machines on Intel/Linux.
The most dramatic transformation, however, was in storage. EMC IT eliminated 9 out of every 10 disk drives needed to deliver EMC’s required database performance. Using Enterprise Flash Drives and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) in Symetrix V-Max, EMC IT was able to triple database transaction throughput at one-fourth the storage cost.
There’s plenty of detail, including charts showing cost savings and business benefits, in this whitepaper on EMC’s web site.