11 About Database as a Service (DBaaS)

About Database as a Service (DBaaS)

Enterprises need to support hundreds or even thousands of applications to meet growing business demands and this growth has driven up the cost of running and managing the databases under those applications. This puts a lot of stress on the IT budget and makes it harder to provide databases to support new requirements such as Web 2.0 applications or other emerging collaboration solutions or even to support other uses such as increased application testing.

Private Clouds enable customers to consolidate servers, storage, and database workloads onto a shared hardware and software infrastructure. By providing on-demand access to database services in a self-service, elastically scalable and metered manner, databases deployed as DBaaS on Private Cloud offer compelling advantages in cost, quality of service, and agility.

DBaaS extends the Oracle Private Cloud Management solution by automating the lifecycle of a database and allowing users to request database services through self-service portal. With this solution, IT Managers no longer have to perform mundane administrative tasks for provisioning databases. Database users can get instantaneous access to new database services through the Self Service Portal.

DBaaS in Enterprise Manager extends the capabilities of the Private Cloud by:

• Increasing Quality of Service: IT organizations are not only trying to drive down costs, they are also looking at solutions that will simultaneously improve quality of service in terms of performance, availability and security. Cloud consumers inherently benefit from the high availability characteristics built into the Private Cloud. Organizations can also enforce a unified identity and security infrastructure as part of standardized provisioning. Thus, instead of bolting on security policies, these policies and compliance regulations are part of the provisioning process.

• Enabling Faster Deployment: Building the Private Cloud infrastructure using standard building block components (for example, servers, CPUs, storage, and network), configurations, and tools, enables a streamlined, automated, and simplified deployment process.

• Providing Resource Elasticity: The ability to grow and shrink the capacity of a given database, both in terms of storage size and compute power, allows applications the flexibility to meet the dynamic nature of business workloads.

• Rapid Provisioning: Databases in a cloud can be rapidly provisioned, often by way of a self-service infrastructure, providing agility in application deployment. This reduces overall time in deploying production applications, development platforms or creating test bed configurations.

Database as a Service in Enterprise Manager

In Enterprise Manager, Database as a Service (DBaaS) is implemented through the following options:

• Virtual Machine Based: The database is deployed as a part of Virtual Assembly or Template and several virtual machines share the same physical server. This offers the maximum level of isolation (at OS level) but creates manageability problems owing to VM sprawl. This option is available through the Infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS) Self Service Portal.

• Shared Cluster: The database is deployed on existing clusterware. Typically the Grid Infrastructure (Clusterware, ASM) and Database software are preinstalled. The cloud service entails the deployment of databases on top of that infrastructure. This option is available in the DBaaS Self Service Portal.

• Shared Installation: The database is deployed as a single instance database on an existing installation. This option is available in the DBaaS Self Service Portal.

Before you implement DBaaS, it is important to select a delivery model that best satisfies the requirements of your application or intended use of database services. It is also possible to adopt multiple delivery models. For example, some simple applications may be hosted on a shared database model, if their requirements are limited to just a schema. Other more complex applications like Oracle Applications may require significant tweaking of the database parameters and would need the shared cluster or shared installation model. The Enterprise Manager DBaaS offering will allow you to implement and manage multiple such delivery models.