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What platform should be employed for database serving in midsize businesses? The answer to this question is changing.
Five years ago, clear distinctions could be drawn between the IT challenges facing large and midsize companies. But this is no longer the case. Increasingly, midsize businesses are deploying sophisticated solutions such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and business intelligence (BI) systems to increase competitiveness and improve operational efficiency. Use of these systems, along with other new database applications and new data retention demands, is causing rapid expansion of data volumes. In most midsize organizations, the amount of raw data is already increasing by 30 to 60 percent per year. Growth rates are expected to accelerate.
At the same time, data structures are growing more complex, demands for cross-organizational access to information are becoming pervasive, and external users increasingly interface to core databases through customer and supplier self-service systems. The challenges of maintaining performance, availability, recoverability, and security of data will grow more daunting over time.
How will these challenges be met? The answer to this question is not a matter of technological detail. It engages the entire business.
Databases house the most powerful competitive resource of the 21st century – information. As conventional forms of differentiation erode, the effectiveness with which organizations use information is becoming an increasingly critical determinant of business performance. That effectiveness, in turn, depends in no small measure upon database infrastructures and the platforms that support them. No component of IT strategy is more important. Most server functions, such as application and Web serving, can be handled comparatively easily by “commodity” platforms. But requirements for core database serving are significantly different. For organizations concerned to meet these requirements now, and in the future, new approaches are needed.
This report looks at one such approach – the use of the IBM Power platform as an alternative to commodity Windows servers.
There are a number of reasons to consider the Power platform:
1. In performance, scalability, and key functional capabilities, it offers a more effective solution for core database serving.
2. It provides state-of-the-art virtualization capabilities in a manner that is a great deal less complex than Windows and VMware technologies.
3. It may cost less.
Costs
Once regarded as an option primarily for large organizations, UNIX servers have grown increasingly affordable. This is particularly the case for the new IBM Power 520 and 550 Express servers, which offer a cost-effective alternative to Windows servers, SQL Server databases, and VMware virtualization tools. This cost-effectiveness is illustrated by four comparisons of manufacturing, distribution, transportation, and retail companies presented in this report. In these comparisons, three-year costs for Power server deployment scenarios with Oracle databases range from 29 percent to 37 percent less, and average 32 percent less than those for Windows- and SQL Server-based equivalents.
If both Windows and Power platforms are equipped with Oracle databases, three-year costs for Power server scenarios range from 41 percent to 52 percent less, and average 45 percent less. In these comparisons, Power server scenarios include the AIX 6.1 operating system and Oracle 11g Standard Edition, while Windows servers are configured with Windows Server 2005 Enterprise Edition and SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition or Oracle 11g Standard Edition.
Three-year costs include hardware acquisition and maintenance, license and support costs for systems and database software, system administration personnel, and facilities (primarily power and cooling) costs. Windows server-based scenarios include use of VMware Infrastructure 3 tools.
Hardware, maintenance, and software license and support costs were calculated using “street” prices (i.e., discounted prices actually paid by users). The basis of these calculations is discussed in the Detailed Data section of this report. Actual prices and costs experienced by individual organizations may vary. Cost disparities, however, are only part of the picture. Distinctive Power platform capabilities in performance, scalability, availability, virtualization, system and workload management, personnel productivity, and overall complexity reduction also contribute to the business case for this platform. These capabilities are discussed below. Later sections of the report deal in more detail with the business importance of core database serving in midsize organizations, and with the distinctive technical characteristics of Power platforms that are relevant to this role.
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