WHITE PAPER
STRIVE FOR
SIMPLICITY
Enterprises that
have mastered the
skill of simplifying
reap the benefit of
better visibility into
their business.
IT infrastructures that cut through
complexity to drive business benefits
Uncertainty appears to have become a standard operating procedure in the business world. The current global economic situation combined with the pressures of
a hypercompetitive global marketplace is affecting enterprises in many ways. While
companies are feeling the challenge of tight IT budgets, departmental cuts, and
resource constraints, a notable and important business need has emerged: the need
to simplify. Today, forward-thinking enterprises are taking a close look at what they
need and what they don’t—trimming excess spending, jettisoning processes that
don’t drive revenue, and streamlining complicated operations. Enterprises that have
mastered the skill of simplifying reap the benefits of better visibility into their business, a more nimble structure that reacts quickly to customers and the market, and
even reduced spending.
For technology executives, the mandate to simplify is particularly important, as IT
is being pressured to do more with less, with flat or decreasing budgets and fewer
resources. Business innovation is increasingly dependent on the application of
information technology as well. IT leaders are challenged to architect and build infrastructures that meet 24/7 business demands while remaining within the limitations
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WHITE PAPER: STRIVE FOR SIMPLICITY
set for them. What’s needed is a simplified
IT infrastructure that lowers costs, streamlines data management, and provides
the high performance levels required to
deliver real-time decision making capabilities to the business.
“Simplifying IT ensures
that the business has
the right expectations
of the system, that
there’s clear cause
and effect, so that if
something is changed
in the system, the
impact will be clear.”
8 Adopting storage systems that
come application-aware and feature
built-in intelligence to manage entire
data lifecycles
8 Embracing virtualization across the
board, not just with certain platforms
When it comes to IT, however, simplicity
8 Moving toward core components that
is a challenging goal. Over the years, the
feature automation and intelligence
vast majority of enterprise IT architectures have become entangled in pieceThis analysis also gives technology
meal technologies that were designed
executives an opportunity to determine
to deliver focused or select features to
whether their organizations have proper
achieve a certain goal, but don’t typically
expectations for what IT infrastructures
—Ravi Pendekanti
acknowledge the surrounding environcan deliver. By evaluating each techVice President, Systems Product Marketing
Oracle
ment. IT departments have put together
nology component, determining its value,
layers of products and services that don’t
translating that value in business terms
integrate, and therefore can’t live up to
to company executives, and defining
their promises and fail to provide for the future. Because of the time
which function within IT is responsible for it, CIOs can expect better
and expense associated with getting best-of-breed products to
visibility into what works in their enterprise environment and what
work together, enterprise IT departments are often prevented from
needs revamping.
attaining the full benefit of these offerings, or end up absorbing the
“Simplifying IT enables establishment of roles and responsibilities of
added expense of hiring consultants to stitch them together. And
the professionals who keep the infrastructure up and running,” says
because they typically target a single technology challenge, these
Pendekanti. “It also ensures that the business has the right expectapoint products don’t include broad and centrally-managed feature
tions of the system, that there’s clear cause and effect, so that if
sets, and force IT to frequently upgrade or swap out offerings to
something is changed in the system, the impact will be clear.”
keep up with the needs of the business.
Simplifying IT is a bold move—particularly as resources today are
“With such complexity, business goals are lost and quality goes
typically stretched so thin that IT departments are struggling just
down,” says Ravi Pendekanti, vice president of systems product
to keep the lights on—but the benefits are worth the investment.
marketing with Oracle. “People are so focused on dealing with
Simplifying IT can result in:
complexity that they overlook quality, and they may not be getting the
benefits they expected from their offerings in terms of performance.”
8 Lowering costs by consolidating workloads onto fewer platforms
So as enterprise IT data centers have become more complex and
technology has started to impede rather than help core business goals, a need for simplicity mandates a rethinking of how IT
architects its solutions. While many have found success reducing
complexity in targeted areas—for example using virtualization to
simplify system management and increase utilization—there are
opportunities to take these efforts to the next level and tackle
complexity at its core. And while doing so, it’s essential that IT
departments keep simplicity in mind amidst strategic transitions,
such as from the physical to the virtual, so new layers of complexity
aren’t introduced.
A STRATEGY OF SIMPLICITY
Taking steps toward simplicity means evaluating existing systems to
determine where big chunks of complexity can be reduced, or even
eliminated completely. It’s a detailed process to analyze every IT
component and determine what aspects can be simplified, but the
exercise produces results. Simplicity can come from, for example:
8Choosing preintegrated systems that deliver the entire environment from application to disk and are tuned to meet business
needs, to quickly achieve productivity and ROI goals
8 Optimizing infrastructure to reduce bottlenecks, accelerate
performance, and enable better real-time decision-making
8 Giving users faster access to critical information
8 Delivering faster time-to-value by eliminating complex system
integration
8 Enhancing accountability and control over IT assets
Taking steps to simplify IT through actions such as consolidating
platforms can result in many benefits, particularly for companies
in need of streamlining data management. At Turkcell, Turkey’s
leading mobile communications and technology company, the
staggering amount of data that had to be managed¬—more
than 500 TB and growing—threatened to slow down the essential process of generating and delivering business reports. The
company’s IT department was constantly trying to keep up with
the performance and capacity needs of the business. By consolidating its data warehousing infrastructure, Turkcell was able to
boost system speeds by tenfold while lowering costs. And by
leveraging data compression features, the company cut the size of
its data repository by a factor of eight.
Turkcell was able to consolidate its data warehouses onto a
single, integrated platform without requiring changes to its system
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WHITE PAPER: STRIVE FOR SIMPLICITY
interfaces, and now has a scalable
platform with room for growth. What’s
more, the company expects ROI to reach
at least 25 percent over three years, with
total benefits expected to hit millions of
U.S. dollars over three years.
ACHIEVING SIMPLICITY
Planning is just as
crucial as the other
elements of successful
projects—products,
people, and processes
—and should be
treated accordingly.
One key component to helping IT organizations simplify their infrastructures
is to choose technology differently.
Instead of going with best-of-breed
point products that may or may not integrate with other products on the network and run the risk of introducing unnecessary
complexity, customers can benefit by chosing engineered systems
that are preintegrated to reduce cost and complexity while also
boosting productivity and performance. These systems embody
the principles of simplifying IT by providing computing functionality
that arrives pretested and ready to run for a given application or
workload. Pre-engineered systems give enterprises the advantage
of simplifying data-center operations, opening up greater opportunities for business innovation.
Enterprises also benefit from vendors that behave and engage
like partners. This means understanding how their products
work within their customers’ environments and integrate with
the products around them, testing and documenting products
so customers can set performance expectations appropriately,
and taking the guesswork out of finding the right solution. It also
means doing all these things in the course of business, not as an
expensive consulting or service add-on.
“Vendors who put a veneer of services around their products
are eating into customers’ sparse resources; do customers
really want to have to pay for that extra layer?” asks Oracle’s
Pendekanti.
To achieve and maintain simplicity, enterprise IT departments
must also gain a high level of understanding about how products
work and integrate to create clean IT architectures and set product
expectations appropriately. Performance guidelines and other
product blueprints provided by vendors shed light on how offerings were architected, work, and integrate, helping IT departments
avoid unnecessarily complex solutions and gain an understanding
of the performance levels that should be expected.
Proper planning can also help companies achieve the simplicity
they’re looking for. Planning is just as crucial as the other elements
of successful projects—products, people, and processes—and
should be treated accordingly. Most importantly, project planning
should happen before implementation begins, to avoid missteps
that can complicate and detract from simplicity.
ORACLE’S TAKE
ON SIMPLIFICATION
Engineered systems from Oracle are the
key to simplifying IT. These preintegrated
systems are optimized for enterprisegrade performance, enable faster time
to production, and reduce costs associated with purchasing, deploying, and
supporting IT environments. Oracle’s
Exadata Database Machine and Exalogic
Elastic Cloud are designed to do just
that, helping enterprises meet goals for
consolidation and simplification while delivering industry-leading
performance gains. For customers looking to run both Exatada
Database and Exalogic Elastic Cloud on the same system, Oracle
offers SPARC SuperCluster.
The Oracle Exadata Database Machine offers extreme performance for large data warehouses, large online transaction
processing (OLTP) databases and mixed workloads, making it
the ideal platform for consolidation onto private clouds. It is
a complete and fully integrated package of high-performance
servers, low-latency storage, high-speed Infiniband networking,
and software that is scalable, secure, and redundant. According
to a leading market analyst firm, organizations seeking solutions
to the increasing demands for performance and scalability in their
data architecture are turning in growing numbers to appliances
such as the Oracle Exadata Database Machine because they help
improve performance and reduce costs.
The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud platform features hardware and
software engineered together to provide extreme performance
for Java applications, Oracle applications, and all other enterprise
applications. Exalogic is designed for reliability, serviceability and
performance under widely varied, performance-sensitive, missioncritical workloads. Exalogic dramatically improves application
performance with no code changes required, and reduces application implementation and ongoing costs vs. traditional enterprise
application platforms and private clouds assembled from separately sourced components.
BOTTOM LINE
Ultimately, enterprise IT should work toward the goal of technology being simple enough that features required to get the job
done are delivered upon request. One day, receiving IT services
should be as simple as getting electricity from the power grid—
simply plug something in and it works. Until then, IT departments, with the help of the right vendors and products, should
constantly strive to simplify to cut costs, boost performance and
productivity, and deliver business value. ;
EXECUTIVE
VIEWPOINT
Cutting Through Complexity
Simplifying IT Drives Performance, Quality
Ravi Pendekanti
VICE PRESIDENT
SYSTEMS PRODUCT MARKETING
ORACLE
Ravi heads Systems
Product Marketing for
Oracle on a global basis. He
has been in the Systems
industry for more than two
decades, working in the
areas of servers, storage,
software and networking.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
please visit www.oracle.com
IT infrastructures are getting more complicated
responsibilities. For example, in a complex
as new features and capabilities are constantly
environment if you tweak a few things, you don’t
being added. Oracle’s Ravi Pendekanti discusses
know if that affects the network admin or the sys-
this phenomenon, and the advantages of
tem admin, and troubleshooting takes longer. In
simplicity.
the past it used to be simple: I call my sys admin
when I have a problem. Now I don’t know who to
What challenges do technology executives
call. Is poor performance due to a bad network
face in supporting complex IT environments?
connection? Is the service provider not giving
Technology executives typically look at best-
you the right bandwidth? Are your own routers
of-breed components to get the features they
not working? Is there something in the software?
need, but overlook the time and cost to integrate
There are so many things that could potentially
them, which can be huge. What people some-
be the cause.
“What people sometimes think might be simple integration
might not be as simple as they originally perceived.”
times think might be a simple integration might
How do technology executives build simpli-
not be as simple as they originally perceived.
fied architectures while adhering to budget-
And they may not get the benefit they expected
ary and resource constraints?
in terms of performance. It’s complicated with
It comes down to choosing the vendor. Think
virtualization and cloud. People are running
of it as one hand to shake. Enterprises should
multiple applications on the same system and
choose the vendor that has done the due dili-
it becomes unruly. You think you can run a
gence, kicked the tires, and understands how
certain number of applications on a specific
products work together and that they are tested
system and get optimal performance, but that’s
and documented. A vendor that takes the
not typically happening.
guesswork out of it. Even vendors who offer a
full range of products aren’t fully exploiting
Can you explain?
this in terms of getting everything engineered
Just taking a look at one component: the CPU,
together.
for example, isn’t an accurate gauge of performance anymore. What about the storage and
How do companies ensure they’re making
memory? And in the virtualized world, what
the right technology decisions?
happens when an application hogs all the
First off they should distinguish between refer-
resources? Its affect can be nontrivial, and you
ence customers and case studies. A reference
have to make sure you don’t forget about security,
customer says `We got this kind of benefit out
since you don’t want to expose access to certain
of this’ and then says what was accomplished.
data across various application boundaries. I
But looking at case studies to see how it was
think CIOs are walking the tightrope in finding a
accomplished is much more meaningful as it
balance between technologies like virtualization
provides insight into ‘how’ and not just ‘what.’
and the integration of various applications.
Also it’s always good to look to performance
benchmarks to serve as guidelines. Documenta-
What are the business benefits of a
tion about how systems are architected, blue-
simplified IT architecture?
prints that explain how it’s done in a methodical
Having a simple, nimble architecture makes
fashion are essential. Then customers can get a
deployment easier, ensures the right expecta-
better understanding of how a certain imple-
tions, and enables better clarity of roles and
mentation is done.