by Chris Fuller and Kyle Hailey
To improve infrastructure and DBMS software utilization, and to drive greater IT operational productivity, companies are implementing internal DaaS capabilities to address their database needs.
Without DaaS problems arise where project teams hoard. They always ask for more, and they never give back. They also never tell DBAs which databases they’re hoarding and which ones they are actually using. As Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project puts it
“you have to wait months or quarters to get a test environment. When that happens terrible things happen. People actually horde environments. They invite people to their teams because they know they have a reputation for having a cluster of test environments so people end up testing on environments that are years old which doesn’t actually achieve the goal.”
Over subscriptions & Perceived Instability
To counteract low asset utilization, many organizations oversubscribe their DBMS servers, which can create significant performance issues and undermine long-term DaaS adoption objectives.
As oversubscribed databases compete for finite server resources, poor performance is experienced by all, resulting in the perception that the service is “unstable.”
However, with up to 50% of databases not in active use, an “All-and-Everything” approach leads to a very inefficient use of CPU, memory, DBMS software, storage and datacenter facility resources.
Database-as-a-Service with Delphix
Delphix transforms the economics of DaaS and eliminates the risks of oversubscriptions by enabling a “concurrent use” model, where databases not in active use are simply held in Delphix, increasing DBMS server utilization by 2X or more.
Some customers have also used Delphix to consolidate environments. Compared to physical databases, VDBs are far more agile and easy to provision, de-provision or move across servers. You can take underutilized hardware and consolidate databases easily thus increasing hardware utilization and reducing database license costs in some cases.
Example
Normally, you might have multiple test environments for each source database reflecting the various database versions and hardware configurations for compatibility testing.
Things are different with Delphix.
Delphix connects to a production server and collecting all the changes that it uses to create on demand virtual databases.
Delphix also registers target machines that can be used to run virtual databases (VDB). IN this example, each target reflects a different configuration that needs to be tested.
In this situation you can you can just provision VDBs to the associated test environment, conduct the testing, and then disconnect or de-provision the VDB.
Customers have done just that and cut HW costs while also reducing DB license costs by 30%.
Project Savings and “Plug-and-Play”
Portfolio and/or project teams achieve significant savings from their perspective by only subscribing to the “host” databases that they need.
Delphix VDBs are simply swapped in and out of their host databases as necessary in minutes, not the hours or days that it typically takes to refresh or reload databases.
Project Team Agility Included
As important (if not more) are the data agility benefits that Delphix provides to project teams, enabling them to deliver releases and enhancements 20%-50% faster more with higher quality.
Summary
Delphix changes the conversation between project teams and DaaS Administrators entirely. It’s not, “how many databases do you need to host” its “how many concurrent environments do we need to provide.” The risk due to oversubscriptions disappears entirely.
With Delphix, companies will significantly reduce their HW, SW, and facility costs related to DaaS by up to 50%, while providing their project teams with the agile data capabilities they need to meet aggressive budgets and milestones.
30% fewer servers
50% fewer DBMS Licenses
90% less storage
30% less floor- space
30% less power
20% to 50% improved project team productivity.
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