The need for the best technology when it comes to IT

IT departments are under constant pressure to increase their ability to respond rapidly to business requirements while reducing cost and risk. In the IT department there is a constant need to select the “best technology” to meet these demands. The constant churn of new and better technologies eventually becomes an inhibitor to these key demands because IT is left with a plethora of technologies, from cutting edge to legacy. This results in complexity and integration challenges. These effects add up to drive agility, cost, and risk in the wrong directions. While it is clear that cloud computing offers many potential benefits, many people just don’t know where to start or simply consider that this latest technology is just not ready for prime time.

By providing a fully integrated stack, “from Applications to Disk”, the data center is greatly simplified while integration is already built-in. This paves the way for reduced cost and risk. State-of-art applications and software provide the ultimate flexibility to IT, leading to true business agility. The core architectural strategies of cloud computing are fully exploited in the early stages, resulting in a “private cloud” and avoids concerns like “loss of control”.

Cloud Computing is still new and largely misunderstood, however, a well optimized data center is an incremental approach towards cloud rather than a big-bang transformation. This incremental approach reduces risk of IT change a carefully planned roadmap for data center optimization can ultimately deliver all the benefits of full scale transformation. While the optimized data center certainly incorporates some of the five NIST criteria for cloud computing, it does not enforce all its principles to the level that one would for a pure Cloud solution. For example, the optimized data center provides resource pooling and some degree of elasticity. It also includes some level of self-service and automation to the degree necessary to take advantage of these as optimizations, making the data center more responsive to the demands of rapid change. At the same time it avoids the risk of giving up control altogether or too quickly. Readiness for cloud computing becomes a question of maturity of the enterprise (and the tools) in many dimensions beyond architecture and infrastructure. In the meantime, the Oracle optimized data center provides a risk-free introduction to cloud computing without compromising longer-term strategies.

This needs to be a key element to a business and in turn it must be well planned out and mapped out for a business to make good use of this. Together with optimizations for applications, middleware, and database, these make up the foundation for the Oracle optimized data center and provide the very best in performance, reliability, security, manageability, lower risk, and lower cost.