Why Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) |

It’s All About The Data: Protecting Your Most Valuable Asset

Over the past year news of data theft has become as commonplace as changes in the weather. Nary a week goes by where we don’t hear of another major leak of sensitive data, from customer personal information to credit card data to corporate secrets. What has changed over time is the frequency and impact of [...]
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SOA Enablement – The Need For A Strategy

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a concept for distributed computing that transforms IT for the enterprise. The term “SOA” is used very broadly and at times loosely by vendors. SOA typically consist of a combination of technologies, products, infrastructure extensions and various frameworks/APIs. Some of the vendors with SOA implementation stacks are Oracle, IBM, Tibco, [...]
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Make your Portal Usable – Why Usability?

We often talk with our clients interested in portal and content management systems and the technical capabilities that specific platforms make available. They will focus on technical point, counter-point about features, but we are often surprised that the role of users and how they will work with a system is not given as much consideration. [...]
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Why Oracle Database Appliance (ODA)

The Critical Role of Identity & Access Management

In the thousands of networks, systems and applications I’ve assessed and audited in my career I’ve encountered two vulnerabilities far more than any other: weak user account security and poor passwords contributing to unauthorized access to company assets. Rarely does a security assessment go by where I don’t find a user account that had never [...]
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Why Oracle Database Appliance (ODA)

I recently attended a deep dive on the Oracle Database Appliance (ODA) and let me tell you, there is a lot to love with this product. Briefly, it’s a single 4-RU appliance that contains a pair of servers and 12 TB (raw) of SAS disk storage. The servers are clustered using internal redundant 1 GbE interconnects, and support both 1 GbE and 10 GbE external networking connectivity. Hence, this will easily fit into both 1 & 10 GbE environments. Each server, running Oracle Linux, comes with a pair of 6-core Intel Xeon CPUs and 96 GB of RAM.

Four 73 Gb Solid-State disks (SSDs) provide extremely fast access to the Oracle redo logs. Also, this appliance supports both Oracle RAC and Oracle Rac One Node for “active-active” or “active-passive” failover of the database. As a matter of fact, the only issue I see with the ODA, is that (currently) you MUST triple mirror and hence get only 4 TB of usable storage. Supporting both OLTP and DW applications, ODA could fit in a number of deployments. Every deployment? Probably not, although IT IS A very versatile tool in our toolbox.

Bluenog specializes in building applications based on the Oracle Middleware, SOA, and Identity Management stacks. Most of these components do have minor database needs by themselves, but If we were building an application that had large storage needs of its own, then it may be considered. Another possibility would be a situation where the data needed to remain isolated for, say, compliance reasons. In this situation, it may not be acceptable to keep the data on the same large storage array used by other facets of the company.

We also have a very active Engineered Systems practice that is currently involved in a number of Exadata and Exalogic systems; also game changing products. In a situation where the customer didn’t need the capacity of an Exadata, ODA could fit very nicely.