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Reducing Oracle licensing costs with Sunlight NexVisor

THE VIRTUALISATION/PERFORMANCE TRADE-OFF

Your Oracle Database is one of the most performance-critical elements of your business applications. Outages and slowdowns in transaction processing can directly translate to millions of dollars of lost revenue and dissatisfied users, so keeping the database fast, responsive to spikes in demand, and highly available is a business priority.

Multicore processors and large system memory capacity have now moved the performance conversation away from compute to the storage system. Storage solutions supporting virtualized Oracle instances need to handle a dynamic mix of transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) databases. This requires efficient delivery of both random and sequential read/write performance for all databases across sizable amounts of active data.

Virtualizing your Oracle Database, on-prem or in the cloud, gives great administration flexibility, high availability and scale-out capability, but creates a massive performance penalty compared with bare metal. Throwing high performance technologies such as NVMe storage and NUMA memory at the problem doesn't work because legacy virtualization platforms can’t take full advantage of them. This necessitates deploying more cores and more infrastructure, resulting in far higher IT cost than necessary, both in terms of infrastructure but also Oracle license costs. In AWS, Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) are necessary for guaranteed IO performance – but add another significant layer of cost.

VIRTUALISATION WITH BARE METAL PERFORMANCE

Sunlight solves this challenge by providing the first hyperconverged infrastructure platform that achieves near bare metal performance on commodity hardware - thanks to its NexVisor hypervisor. This enables Oracle to take advantage of the full performance capacity of each host, reducing overall hardware requirements, simplifying architectures, and minimizing Oracle license spend. Sunlight also gives maximum flexibility, as it can run in your own datacenter, or in the cloud – including AWS.

This datasheet walks you through the key performance advantages of running Oracles workloads on Sunlight.

Author:

Hannah Mellow

Marketing Director

Date: 21 Jan 2021