Oracle is making a big push to grow the installed base of its new Exalytics in-memory appliance. To encourage sales, Oracle is offering tempting deals. As a result, some customers who weren’t seriously considering an Exalytics purchase are walking away with a new hardware appliance!
As exciting as the prospect of new hardware optimized to work with your Oracle business analytics environment is – you still need to answer the question of what to do with it once you have it. An important initial step is identifying an application where an Exalytics implementation will increase performance and/or reduce costs.
Candidate applications should be scored using predefined criteria. At a minimum, the application selected should be stable, reliable, and measured according to existing performance metrics. This baseline will provide data that can be extrapolated to larger populations of applications.
Cost measures are equally important. Increasing the resources available to any application is likely to improve performance; however, there may be other less expensive options to achieve the same performance improvement.
Developing a full understanding of the benefits and cost of deploying Exalytics requires careful planning and ongoing measurement.
Author: Ron Woodlock, Performance Architects
