Oracle Exadata – Reducing Maintenance Costs with Multi-Vendor Support
Oracle released its first Exadata Database Machine back in 2014 with the release of V1. Since then, there have been 13 other releases of Oracle’s engineered system. Many of these systems are now End of Service Life (EOSL). However, these are high performance and stable solutions that organizations have spent many millions of dollars acquiring and deploying for their application database needs.
Exadata Database Machine EOSL Dates
Oracle recently stated that 86% of the Fortune 100 were running Exadata solutions. CDS has enabled many of these organizations to recognize significant cost savings across hardware, OS, and software maintenance and support on Exadata systems. Organizations have redirected upwards of 50% of the Exadata maintenance spend to strategic modernization initiatives, while maintaining service delivery, uptime, and SLA requirements.
CDS Exadata Database Machine Support Options
CDS provides customers with the opportunity to reduce maintenance costs on hardware, OS, and software for Oracle Exadata. CDS’ highly experienced and trained engineers have the software experience required in order to provide the Hardware and OS support.For those customers that want to reduce the cost of the Oracle software maintenance, our engineers can provide support on the software stack including Active Data Guard, Advanced Compression, Database Vault, Oracle RAC, and Automatic Storage Management.
Is Third Party Support the Right Choice for Your Exadata Database Machine?
The short answer to this, is not always. At CDS, we take a clear and transparent risk-based approach to identifying where and when to help customers unlock spend in the data center. There are two key factors to risk assessment for Oracle Exadata- are there parts available for the solution, and is there system and release stability.
Oracle Exadata Parts Availability
The chart below depicts CDS’ view on Exadata parts availability risk. Systems in green CDS has full global inventory and parts access to meet customer SLA requirements. Those systems in orange, inventory is continuing to build but there is some risk. Those in red CDS would advise against moving to third party support at this time.
Oracle Exadata Release Stability
There have been one hundred critical system updates released by Oracle since 2012. These have been across InfiniBand, Exadata Storage Server, and Database Server. As can be seen in the chart below, the majority of these have been on the Exadata Storage Server.
The number of critical issues has reduced over time, as can be seen in the Exadata Database critical issue chart example below:
When considering what Exadata systems to move to third party support, it is worth noting that the latest critical issues relate to the newest software releases and X7- and X8- engineered systems. We would advise customers to plan to move these to third party support over the next two to three years.
Is Now the Right Time to Move X5-8 and X5-2 Systems to Third Party Support?
CDS has a full global parts inventory for X5-8 and X5-2 systems, and there is high release stability on these systems.These systems can be moved to third party support, reducing Oracle maintenance costs by 40%-50%.
Budget Planning 2022 and 2023
Organizations can start to immediately recognize cost savings across hardware, OS, and software maintenance on X5-8 and X5-2 appliances, while maintaining uptime and SLAs. While we do not yet recommend moving X6 or X7 generations to third party support, organizations should start to plan on associated cost savings for 2022 and 2023 budgets.
