As Published In January/February 2009

Oracle Magazine: What are some of the characteristics of a next-generation data center?

Sunday: We’re seeing exponential growth in computing and exponential growth in storage requirements, and data centers of the future are going to have to be designed from the ground up to meet the changing needs of business. The ability to optimize the utilization of resources based on ever-changing demands is a fundamental need of the next-generation data center.

With that, businesses are increasingly requiring that their systems simply never go down. The ability to eliminate nonscheduled, but also scheduled, outages is absolutely key. Also, a next-generation data center needs to be evergreen. That is, it needs to continue to be expandable, leveraging the latest technologies to once again meet the ever-changing needs of the business. Finally, it needs to be eco-efficient from the ground up and designed for sustainability. Effectively, green computing needs to be a core design element.

Oracle Magazine: How does eco-efficiency, or green computing, fit into the next-generation data center?

Sunday: The area I put the most focus on is power: 1.5 percent of all the energy consumed in the United States is in the walls of data centers. So it’s really critical to optimize the technologies for cooling, lighting, and other support services within the facility.

It starts with the physical building: using construction materials that are recycled, manufactured, or fabricated near a site. A lot of hazardous materials are associated with all the computing components in a facility, so how those are managed is also a key part of the design. But everything you do with the physical facility, from a power or construction standpoint, is actually dwarfed by what you do on the floor—that is, how your IT department operates. By standardizing and virtualizing—managing more effectively—you’re dramatically improving resource utilization across everything you’re doing.

Oracle Magazine: How has Oracle implemented next-generation data center technology and practices?

Sunday: Oracle’s focus on taking advantage of the latest data center technologies—from the standpoints of construction, operations, and technology—dates back several years.

For example, our Austin facility was named 2005 Data Center of the Year by AFCOM [an association for data center professionals] and Network World. Oracle was also recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2007 as a Leading Green Power Purchaser.

So, from the early days of Austin, we’ve tried to optimize, through dynamic power management, everything we’re doing with cooling. The Austin data center was one of the first facilities to separate the hot and cool air so we could run the facility more efficiently. Additionally, we’ve been recycling more than 1 million gallons of water a year, reducing the load on the local aquifers.

Oracle Magazine: What benefits is Oracle gaining from implementing next-generation data centers?

Sunday: It turns out that with our approach of standardizing all of our equipment on commodity x86 servers running Linux, as well as the heavy use of virtualization, we’ve been able to significantly increase asset utilization and drive down labor component usage. We have less equipment, are consuming less power, and require fewer people.

But equally important is that we have a lot more agility to provide a higher level of services to our employees as well as our external customers. This commodity-based grid computing approach has been really ideal for running the latest applications based on service-oriented architecture.

For example, during fiscal year 2008, we transformed our Oracle University business, an approximately [US]$500 million operation, from one that required provisioning 1,200 to 1,400 environments spanning Oracle’s entire product line every week to a virtual grid environment with one-sixth the hardware while doubling the number of classes we can deliver. So, again, that’s a significant savings in not only the power but also the number of people it takes to run the equipment.

For another line of business, we put a significant focus on consolidating, virtualizing, and optimizing the operations. So in our 2008 fiscal year, we were able to reduce the total cost of computing equipment, facilities, labor, overhead—in fact, every aspect of what we’re charging them, by 35 percent. Continuing along this path, we expect to take out another 30 percent of computing costs in fiscal year 2009.

Next Steps LEARN about Oracle’s solutions for empowering the green enterprise

Oracle Magazine: What can other companies do to transform their data centers into next-generation data centers?

Sunday: It starts with the basics: consolidate, standardize, and virtualize. You have to begin by inventorying what you have, plus all the resources you’re using: people, labor, power, and so forth. Additionally, take stock of your applications wherever possible, consolidate those, and standardize processes—but then move toward a commodity-based platform running Linux and also virtualize significantly.

Begin with pilot areas. You’ll see that you can get some very significant successes and proceed across your entire application base. In fact, we’ve been able to extend this approach across twenty thousand servers, supporting Oracle’s employees as well as thousands of external customers.

Oracle Magazine: What is your long-term vision for computing at Oracle?

Sunday: Where I see us heading is toward the ability to configure applications based on software components; being able to dynamically provision those across a computing grid; being able to live-migrate those to other environments, larger or smaller; and meeting the current compute requirements. In fact, if there’s a test environment that’s no longer needed, we will be able to “park” this environment and reinstantiate it in seconds when it is needed again. If we have a physical server failure, we will leverage the dynamic grid computing capability to migrate that workload into another virtual environment. In fact, we will be able to manage the virtual environments not only within one physical data center but also across multiple data centers.

So really, my vision for the future is an elastic grid that runs all the applications for the wide variety of stakeholders we support, both internal and external to Oracle. Our goal is not only to meet the ever-changing needs of the business but also to do so in a cost-effective and sustainable manner.