Fascinating! I ran into some of the same issues back in the late nineties and early 2000s over NFS for Oracle databases. While the manageability and cost advantages of NFS for Oracle were obvious and compelling, many organizations could not implement it because of exactly this type of political issue.
Oracle databases were owned by the DBA group. SAN storage was owned by the storage networking group. Who owned the IP network used for NFS (typically a flat, isolated network for only Oracle data NFS traffic)?
IP networks were typically owned by the network administration group. The DBA group worked well with the SAN group, and they did not want to give up that connection.
In one case, there were even collective bargaining agreements in place covering all of this!
Of course, what Oracle is really attempting to accomplish is a return to the days of Big Blue, where eveything was under the control of one group, and there was really only one vendor in the data center: IBM. (For this reason, I have frequently heard the Oracle / Sun / Exa**** strategy referred to as "Big Red".
The rub on that idea is of course what do you do with your Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, Sybase, DB2, etc., etc.? Unless and until Oracle comes up with an interesting and compelling story for managing all of the workloads in a data center (which admitted IBM did successfully accomplish up until the early 90s), this strategy seems to be fatally flawed to me.
In addition, if there are hardware failures in exadata storage systems( consider simple disk failure), this task will be compelled to taken out of the DBA group (same scenario as "network engineers are experts"); again it may vary a little site to site
jeff_browning
256 Posts
1
November 11th, 2011 06:00
Fascinating! I ran into some of the same issues back in the late nineties and early 2000s over NFS for Oracle databases. While the manageability and cost advantages of NFS for Oracle were obvious and compelling, many organizations could not implement it because of exactly this type of political issue.
Oracle databases were owned by the DBA group. SAN storage was owned by the storage networking group. Who owned the IP network used for NFS (typically a flat, isolated network for only Oracle data NFS traffic)?
IP networks were typically owned by the network administration group. The DBA group worked well with the SAN group, and they did not want to give up that connection.
In one case, there were even collective bargaining agreements in place covering all of this!
Of course, what Oracle is really attempting to accomplish is a return to the days of Big Blue, where eveything was under the control of one group, and there was really only one vendor in the data center: IBM. (For this reason, I have frequently heard the Oracle / Sun / Exa**** strategy referred to as "Big Red".
The rub on that idea is of course what do you do with your Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, Sybase, DB2, etc., etc.? Unless and until Oracle comes up with an interesting and compelling story for managing all of the workloads in a data center (which admitted IBM did successfully accomplish up until the early 90s), this strategy seems to be fatally flawed to me.
SKT2
2 Intern
•
1.3K Posts
0
November 20th, 2011 18:00
In addition, if there are hardware failures in exadata storage systems( consider simple disk failure), this task will be compelled to taken out of the DBA group (same scenario as "network engineers are experts"); again it may vary a little site to site