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Going Application Grid: Quick Wins, Improvements and Savings
IT departments are under pressure to provide applications that meet volatile demands while also maintaining extremely high quality of service (QoS). And while they’re at it, they’ve been asked to lower costs.
“That’s a tall order,” says Mike Piech, senior director of product marketing, Oracle. “Our customers are responding by using Oracle Fusion Middleware to make better use of the resources they’ve already got, and then making incremental gains toward a grid of shared resources for a whole swath of their applications. We call this approach the application grid.”
Piech goes on to explain, “It’s more than a set of technologies you buy—it’s also architecture and best practices. But a number of the technologies, including application servers, in-memory data grid, and infrastructure management provide the foundation.”
Piech adds that application grid is not an all or nothing proposition. “Three recent customer examples will give you the idea,” says Piech. “Two of these customers have made small or even no investment in new technology and yet made their infrastructure more flexible and scalable. In another example, we’ll see how a longer-term investment in the application grid approach is lowering infrastructure costs for a large set of mission-critical applications.”
Quick Wins
Faced with volatile demand for its social networking service, an Oracle customer has used the clustering capability in Oracle WebLogic Server, which it already owned, to vastly improve the efficiency and speed at which it can scale its application infrastructure.
“They complemented this clustering capability with Oracle WebLogic Server’s powerful scripting mechanism to standardize and automate many of the scaling tasks,” says Piech. “Now they’re scaling to as many as 40 nodes in a given cluster with minimal manual intervention, achieving significant grid-like behavior.
“This is an example of something others can do right now with their WebLogic Server as a first step in the evolution toward a more comprehensive application grid.”
Incremental Gains
Customers in need of more flexibility and a performance boost can add components of Oracle Fusion Middleware to augment current production systems.
“A major auto insurer recently added Oracle Coherence In-Memory Data Grid to a live production application to provide much faster and more reliable access to frequently used data,” says Piech. “The in-memory data grid automatically and dynamically partitions data across many of their servers, so they get lightning-fast access to that data while ensuring continuous data availability. The fact that this customer could adjust capacity to a live application without downtime is another example of application grid’s combination of extreme reliability and performance in the face of high volatility of demand.”
Standardization and Savings
A longer-term commitment to an application grid approach can save money on hardware and maintenance.
“The next phase is to get a big swath of your application infrastructure tied together as one large grid from which all of your applications are sharing resources,” says Piech. “This is a switch for many organizations, which often maintain separate large servers for large applications and small servers for a small applications. An application grid gives you more freedom to standardize and templatize your servers, bringing a cookie cutter approach to your underlying hardware.
Piech offers the example of a large European telecom that maintains up to 1,600 servers running WebLogic-based applications. By using this templatized approach, they are able to manage them with as few as four administrators.
“The benefits of templatizing your hardware configurations are enormous,” says Piech. “It’s much easier to manage and administer because you’re acquiring, configuring, and monitoring everything in the same way, so you’ve significantly reduced your administrative overhead.”
Application Grid with Oracle Fusion Middleware
Oracle Fusion Middleware includes a number of technologies that help customers evolve toward application grid. Offerings such as Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Tuxedo, and Oracle Coherence allow customers to use middleware to enable better sharing of physical resources across a set of application needs for greater efficiency, risk-free scale-out, and better predictability in quality of service.
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