Oracle Exadata is built for mission-critical databases requiring ultra-fast performance and high availability. On Exadata is where you will find enterprise “crown jewel” applications, the most challenging applications to move to the cloud.
If you are moving Oracle workloads from Exadata to the non-Oracle public cloud, you are going to see major data inflation that is going to bust your cloud budget. This blog is going to cover why this happens and how to prevent it.
Why Data Inflates When Moved from Oracle Exadata to the Public Cloud
Culprit #1: Hybrid Columnar Compression
Enterprises using Exadata can take advantage of Oracle’s Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) technology to significantly reduce the footprint of data stored in the database. This Oracle whitepaper claims the average savings ranges from 10x to 15x while real world customer benchmarks have resulted in storage savings of up to 204x. HCC is an Exadata-only solution, so customers migrating from Exadata to the public cloud face the prospect of data inflation as the Oracle database expands to its non-HCC-compressed size. The result is a larger database footprint and a larger cloud bill.
One approach is to use Oracle’s Advanced Compression Option (ACO). This is a significant additional cost for customers who do not already have licenses for ACO. Worse still, additional database server CPU power is required to perform the compression, resulting in the use of more vCPUs and increasing the overall number of core licenses required.
Culprit #2: Database Clones
A database clone is a full clone of the source database used for the purposes of development, testing, or analytics. While Oracle Exadata offers Exadata Snapshot Clones that use a small fraction of disk space and can be spun up or down in seconds, the public cloud requires the creation of full clones that take up space (cost money for cloud resources) plus are time-consuming to manage. Development teams need to be cognizant of the creation of database clones and their impact on cloud spend.
Given that you are reading this now and may be facing Exadata migration problems of your own, I’d like to introduce you to the Silk Platform.
The Silk Platform and its Rich Data Services
Silk works with enterprise customers moving mission-critical workloads to the cloud. Our software product, the Silk Platform, is a virtualized layer that sits between your application stack and cloud infrastructure to supercharge your databases in the cloud. Rich data services include deduplication, data reduction, thin provisioning, and zero-footprint clones to mitigate data inflation, deliver 10x the database performance of cloud native alone, and save on cloud costs.
Silk’s inline data reduction technology uses resources on the data layer to compress and deduplicate your database without exposure to additional Oracle license costs. This takes place without the need for user intervention and has no effect on performance, offering customers a considerably more cost-efficient solution.
For more information, download Silk for Oracle. You can also request a demo of the Silk Platform and talk our team today.
