Had an excellent conversation with a customer today about Oracle Exadata and the organization challenges it poses. Keep in mind that this conversation applies to many other converged appliances and not just Oracle Exadata. What the customer expressed, contrary to Exadata marketing, is this big appliance must be managed my multiple groups and not just the Oracle DBAs. For example, The Infiniband switches and their management (patching, hardening, etc.) was the ownership of the network group. As this was explained to me it really struck home as the network engineers are the experts and should own the infiniband switches and the management switch.

Okay but that’s all that might have to be delegated outside the DBA group, right? Not really, as the KVM, rack and all physical connections were managed by a physical datacenter group. Understandable, as power, cooling, weight, airflow and access do require other expertise including security.

Lastly, this customer had a tools group responsible for managing all the all software tools including Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM), Oracle Grid Control (GC) and many others. The same concerns do apply to tools: security, management and standardization.

So who really owns Oracle Exadata? The customer I talked to expressed that the "who managed and owned what" within Exadata took two weeks of meetings to nail down. Wow! The real answer might be that it’s different from company to company but considering this recent customer conversation I believe most DBAs really shouldn’t plan on owning everything Exadata.