WHITE PAPER

STRIVE FOR SIMPLICITY

Enterprises that have mastered the skill of simplifying reap the benefit of better visibility into their business.
IT infrastructures that cut through complexity to drive business benefits
Uncertainty appears to have become a standard operating procedure in the business world. The current global economic situation combined with the pressures of a hypercompetitive global marketplace is affecting enterprises in many ways. While companies are feeling the challenge of tight IT budgets, departmental cuts, and resource constraints, a notable and important business need has emerged: the need to simplify. Today, forward-thinking enterprises are taking a close look at what they need and what they donttrimming excess spending, jettisoning processes that dont drive revenue, and streamlining complicated operations. Enterprises that have mastered the skill of simplifying reap the benefits of better visibility into their business, a more nimble structure that reacts quickly to customers and the market, and even reduced spending. For technology executives, the mandate to simplify is particularly important, as IT is being pressured to do more with less, with flat or decreasing budgets and fewer resources. Business innovation is increasingly dependent on the application of information technology as well. IT leaders are challenged to architect and build infrastructures that meet 24/7 business demands while remaining within the limitations

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WHITE PAPER: STRIVE FOR SIMPLICITY

set for them. Whats needed is a simplified IT infrastructure that lowers costs, streamlines data management, and provides the high performance levels required to deliver real-time decision making capabilities to the business.

When it comes to IT, however, simplicity 8 Moving toward core components that is a challenging goal. Over the years, the feature automation and intelligence vast majority of enterprise IT architectures have become entangled in pieceThis analysis also gives technology meal technologies that were designed executives an opportunity to determine to deliver focused or select features to whether their organizations have proper achieve a certain goal, but dont typically expectations for what IT infrastructures Ravi Pendekanti acknowledge the surrounding environcan deliver. By evaluating each techVice President, Systems Product Marketing Oracle ment. IT departments have put together nology component, determining its value, layers of products and services that dont translating that value in business terms integrate, and therefore cant live up to to company executives, and defining their promises and fail to provide for the future. Because of the time which function within IT is responsible for it, CIOs can expect better and expense associated with getting best-of-breed products to visibility into what works in their enterprise environment and what work together, enterprise IT departments are often prevented from needs revamping. attaining the full benefit of these offerings, or end up absorbing the Simplifying IT enables establishment of roles and responsibilities of added expense of hiring consultants to stitch them together. And the professionals who keep the infrastructure up and running, says because they typically target a single technology challenge, these Pendekanti. It also ensures that the business has the right expectapoint products dont include broad and centrally-managed feature tions of the system, that theres clear cause and effect, so that if sets, and force IT to frequently upgrade or swap out offerings to something is changed in the system, the impact will be clear. keep up with the needs of the business. Simplifying IT is a bold moveparticularly as resources today are With such complexity, business goals are lost and quality goes typically stretched so thin that IT departments are struggling just down, says Ravi Pendekanti, vice president of systems product to keep the lights onbut the benefits are worth the investment. marketing with Oracle. People are so focused on dealing with Simplifying IT can result in: complexity that they overlook quality, and they may not be getting the benefits they expected from their offerings in terms of performance. 8 Lowering costs by consolidating workloads onto fewer platforms So as enterprise IT data centers have become more complex and technology has started to impede rather than help core business goals, a need for simplicity mandates a rethinking of how IT architects its solutions. While many have found success reducing complexity in targeted areasfor example using virtualization to simplify system management and increase utilizationthere are opportunities to take these efforts to the next level and tackle complexity at its core. And while doing so, its essential that IT departments keep simplicity in mind amidst strategic transitions, such as from the physical to the virtual, so new layers of complexity arent introduced. 8 Optimizing infrastructure to reduce bottlenecks, accelerate performance, and enable better real-time decision-making 8 Giving users faster access to critical information 8 Delivering faster time-to-value by eliminating complex system integration 8 Enhancing accountability and control over IT assets Taking steps to simplify IT through actions such as consolidating platforms can result in many benefits, particularly for companies in need of streamlining data management. At Turkcell, Turkeys leading mobile communications and technology company, the staggering amount of data that had to be managedmore than 500 TB and growingthreatened to slow down the essential process of generating and delivering business reports. The companys IT department was constantly trying to keep up with the performance and capacity needs of the business. By consolidating its data warehousing infrastructure, Turkcell was able to boost system speeds by tenfold while lowering costs. And by leveraging data compression features, the company cut the size of its data repository by a factor of eight. Turkcell was able to consolidate its data warehouses onto a single, integrated platform without requiring changes to its system

Simplifying IT ensures that the business has the right expectations of the system, that theres clear cause and effect, so that if something is changed in the system, the impact will be clear.

8 Adopting storage systems that come application-aware and feature built-in intelligence to manage entire data lifecycles 8 Embracing virtualization across the board, not just with certain platforms

A STRATEGY OF SIMPLICITY
Taking steps toward simplicity means evaluating existing systems to determine where big chunks of complexity can be reduced, or even eliminated completely. Its a detailed process to analyze every IT component and determine what aspects can be simplified, but the exercise produces results. Simplicity can come from, for example: 8 Choosing preintegrated systems that deliver the entire environment from application to disk and are tuned to meet business needs, to quickly achieve productivity and ROI goals

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WHITE PAPER: STRIVE FOR SIMPLICITY

interfaces, and now has a scalable platform with room for growth. Whats more, the company expects ROI to reach at least 25 percent over three years, with total benefits expected to hit millions of U.S. dollars over three years.

ACHIEVING SIMPLICITY

One key component to helping IT organizations simplify their infrastructures is to choose technology differently. Instead of going with best-of-breed point products that may or may not integrate with other products on the network and run the risk of introducing unnecessary complexity, customers can benefit by chosing engineered systems that are preintegrated to reduce cost and complexity while also boosting productivity and performance. These systems embody the principles of simplifying IT by providing computing functionality that arrives pretested and ready to run for a given application or workload. Pre-engineered systems give enterprises the advantage of simplifying data-center operations, opening up greater opportunities for business innovation. Enterprises also benefit from vendors that behave and engage like partners. This means understanding how their products work within their customers environments and integrate with the products around them, testing and documenting products so customers can set performance expectations appropriately, and taking the guesswork out of finding the right solution. It also means doing all these things in the course of business, not as an expensive consulting or service add-on. Vendors who put a veneer of services around their products are eating into customers sparse resources; do customers really want to have to pay for that extra layer? asks Oracles Pendekanti.

Planning is just as crucial as the other elements of successful projectsproducts, people, and processes and should be treated accordingly.

ORACLES TAKE ON SIMPLIFICATION

Engineered systems from Oracle are the key to simplifying IT. These preintegrated systems are optimized for enterprisegrade performance, enable faster time to production, and reduce costs associated with purchasing, deploying, and supporting IT environments. Oracles Exadata Database Machine and Exalogic Elastic Cloud are designed to do just that, helping enterprises meet goals for consolidation and simplification while delivering industry-leading performance gains. For customers looking to run both Exatada Database and Exalogic Elastic Cloud on the same system, Oracle offers SPARC SuperCluster. The Oracle Exadata Database Machine offers extreme performance for large data warehouses, large online transaction processing (OLTP) databases and mixed workloads, making it the ideal platform for consolidation onto private clouds. It is a complete and fully integrated package of high-performance servers, low-latency storage, high-speed Infiniband networking, and software that is scalable, secure, and redundant. According to a leading market analyst firm, organizations seeking solutions to the increasing demands for performance and scalability in their data architecture are turning in growing numbers to appliances such as the Oracle Exadata Database Machine because they help improve performance and reduce costs. The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud platform features hardware and software engineered together to provide extreme performance for Java applications, Oracle applications, and all other enterprise applications. Exalogic is designed for reliability, serviceability and performance under widely varied, performance-sensitive, missioncritical workloads. Exalogic dramatically improves application performance with no code changes required, and reduces application implementation and ongoing costs vs. traditional enterprise application platforms and private clouds assembled from separately sourced components.

To achieve and maintain simplicity, enterprise IT departments must also gain a high level of understanding about how products work and integrate to create clean IT architectures and set product expectations appropriately. Performance guidelines and other product blueprints provided by vendors shed light on how offerings were architected, work, and integrate, helping IT departments avoid unnecessarily complex solutions and gain an understanding of the performance levels that should be expected. Proper planning can also help companies achieve the simplicity theyre looking for. Planning is just as crucial as the other elements of successful projectsproducts, people, and processesand should be treated accordingly. Most importantly, project planning should happen before implementation begins, to avoid missteps that can complicate and detract from simplicity.

BOTTOM LINE
Ultimately, enterprise IT should work toward the goal of technology being simple enough that features required to get the job done are delivered upon request. One day, receiving IT services should be as simple as getting electricity from the power grid simply plug something in and it works. Until then, IT departments, with the help of the right vendors and products, should constantly strive to simplify to cut costs, boost performance and productivity, and deliver business value. ;

EXECUTIVE

VIEWPOINT
Cutting Through Complexity
Simplifying IT Drives Performance, Quality
IT infrastructures are getting more complicated as new features and capabilities are constantly being added. Oracles Ravi Pendekanti discusses this phenomenon, and the advantages of simplicity. responsibilities. For example, in a complex environment if you tweak a few things, you dont know if that affects the network admin or the system admin, and troubleshooting takes longer. In the past it used to be simple: I call my sys admin when I have a problem. Now I dont know who to What challenges do technology executives face in supporting complex IT environments? Technology executives typically look at bestof-breed components to get the features they need, but overlook the time and cost to integrate them, which can be huge. What people somecall. Is poor performance due to a bad network connection? Is the service provider not giving you the right bandwidth? Are your own routers not working? Is there something in the software? There are so many things that could potentially be the cause.

Ravi Pendekanti
VICE PRESIDENT SYSTEMS PRODUCT MARKETING ORACLE Ravi heads Systems Product Marketing for Oracle on a global basis. He has been in the Systems industry for more than two decades, working in the areas of servers, storage, software and networking.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: please visit www.oracle.com

What people sometimes think might be simple integration might not be as simple as they originally perceived.
times think might be a simple integration might not be as simple as they originally perceived. And they may not get the benefit they expected in terms of performance. Its complicated with virtualization and cloud. People are running multiple applications on the same system and it becomes unruly. You think you can run a certain number of applications on a specific system and get optimal performance, but thats not typically happening. Can you explain? Just taking a look at one component: the CPU, for example, isnt an accurate gauge of performance anymore. What about the storage and memory? And in the virtualized world, what happens when an application hogs all the resources? Its affect can be nontrivial, and you have to make sure you dont forget about security, since you dont want to expose access to certain data across various application boundaries. I think CIOs are walking the tightrope in finding a balance between technologies like virtualization and the integration of various applications. What are the business benefits of a simplified IT architecture? Having a simple, nimble architecture makes deployment easier, ensures the right expectations, and enables better clarity of roles and How do companies ensure theyre making the right technology decisions? First off they should distinguish between reference customers and case studies. A reference customer says `We got this kind of benefit out of this and then says what was accomplished. But looking at case studies to see how it was accomplished is much more meaningful as it provides insight into how and not just what. Also its always good to look to performance benchmarks to serve as guidelines. Documentation about how systems are architected, blueprints that explain how its done in a methodical fashion are essential. Then customers can get a better understanding of how a certain implementation is done. How do technology executives build simplified architectures while adhering to budgetary and resource constraints? It comes down to choosing the vendor. Think of it as one hand to shake. Enterprises should choose the vendor that has done the due diligence, kicked the tires, and understands how products work together and that they are tested and documented. A vendor that takes the guesswork out of it. Even vendors who offer a full range of products arent fully exploiting this in terms of getting everything engineered together.