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The economic uncertainties over the past few years have driven many businesses to streamline internal processes, reduce costs, and seek to maximize the performance of their tools. This has led many Oracle users to adopt the cloud. To get more insight into how Oracle customers are adopting the cloud, Apps Run the World surveyed 223 Oracle customer organizations primarily in the U.S. to determine how their technology infrastructure is being updated and modernized for the cloud. This report discusses the benefits and roadblocks that Oracle customers have encountered during their transition to the cloud.  

CIOs face many challenges in today’s ever changing technology landscape as we continue our ascent into a cloud first world. However, as with any times of change, those challenges offer many opportunities as well. In this blog post we’ll explore both while offering CIOs advice on “what to do if you find yourself stuck with no hope of rescue” — taking a page out of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Three years ago, I would say that if I ever had to go to another tradeshow, it would be too soon. Be careful what you wish for, because I got it and how I have missed connecting with people in person! Therefore, as Microsoft Ignite is quickly approaching, my team and I are getting very excited about attending the event live this year. There are going to be a lot of interesting conversations happening – both at the live and virtual events.

In today’s digital world data is the most precious commodity. According to Statista about 181 zettabytes of data will be created in the year 2025 and through some very crude Microsoft Excel analysis I’m predicting we’ll enter the Yottabyte era sometime between 2030 – 2035. These numbers are almost too large to comprehend but clearly signify the value our society puts on all things data. And the most successful technology companies in the world have built their thrones on the backs of bits and bytes. This blog post will explore how much data exists in the known universe, discuss why data is so important and not so boldly go where many have gone before (yes I am Treky).

As companies big and small continue to come to terms with Google’s recent announcement that it’s axing its IoT core service, you may have already started to feel the ripple effects within your organization. The unexpected cut to such a Tier 1 service is in stark contrast to the almost infinite scaling, flexibility, and growth that the cloud promises. “Up and to the right, smoothly” has been the expectation of many for their cloud journey.

Cloud performance refers to how well your applications, workloads and databases operate on the cloud. Your underlying cloud infrastructure should support your business objectives. In today’s digital age, speed matters. On the cloud, performance is everything. Cloud performance allows you to remain competitive as a business.

Companies are moving their data to the cloud to innovate and take advantage of the cloud’s on-demand resources, availability, and elasticity. And there are key considerations to keep in mind when thinking about the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of running SQL databases on the cloud, including Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server.

Wednesday’s news about Google shuttering its much-hyped IoT core service came as a big surprise to many. And while it is surprising that an amazing company like Google hasn’t found the IoT services traction that it expected, it isn’t surprising that services continue to come, go, and change on all public cloud platforms. And it reminds us that, if we assume our cloud platforms are just one-way, perpetual streams of linear expansion and improvement in functionality, cost, performance, or other variables, we’re in for some potentially painful surprises.

Operationalizing an Oracle database on Azure IaaS includes setting up an RMAN backup schedule much like the backup patterns used on premises. This is is important because despite whatever media you might have as a primary storage mode – it can fail. A backup destination based on a different tech stack is required for true recoverability in this case. A cost effective scenario would be a combination of near online  RMAN backups in the Silk-based ASM Diskgroup +FRA and an ‘offsite’ or rather off platform/region standby and/or backup plan.  This gives both good recovery time objective (RTO) and high durability (MAA). DBA best practices dictate that you have multiple copies of the data—on different media — a BlobFuse backup destination checks this box.

Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is an Oracle proprietary volume manager and file system technology that optimizes storage and management functions for Oracle. Taken together with Silk, they can form a very powerful robust and performant I/O sub system for mission critical database intensive workloads. ASM accomplishes this with DiskGroups, and ASM instances – a special kind of Oracle database instance that serves up I/O to subscribed database instances. Let’s discuss ASM a bit first and then show how Silk leverages ASM to provide best of breed performance for critical IaaS DB workloads.