Digital transformation and end user experience drive businesses to innovate with new applications and enhance core applications flexibility. This is essential for responding to business opportunities and facing competitive threat in the current economy. Survival of the fittest requires an ability to change - to move quickly, adapt, and to seize opportunities.

Modern infrastructure, data explosion, and cloud-native applications create significantly higher pressure on the data fabric and database layer. The responsiveness and security of the database determines the performance of the application. When multiple applications access the database with queries simultaneously, ageing databases growing across legacy infrastructure become the biggest hurdle. Core databases in traditional infrastructure often experience performance degradation because of capacity issues and end up in adding incremental storage resources to maintain the performance. The result: challenges to maintain SLAs, contain costs of data management and slower business speed.

The next sizeable area is to address the data fabric and database solution which matches the agility expectations of DevOps and application releases. Many high-performance databases today use a traditional multi-tier architecture. This implies that legacy compute handles some part of the overall workloads and storage. They often operate in silos, resulting in slow provisioning, inflexibility, poor automation, and complex (hence expensive) disaster recovery. Such fragmented data center (DC) operations also result in high maintenance and license cost and increased security risk. Managed database cloud services can bring in the required focus on automation, security, scale, and consolidation strategy.

DB Platform as a Service (DBPaaS) provides easy and controlled access to databases with minimum administration costs. Cloud databases (DBs) enable organizations to focus on their business-critical applications while the vendor or communications service provider (CSP) manages the underlying infrastructure including performance, availability and security management.

Is moving all databases to public cloud DB services the solution?

This need to be addressed carefully. Gartner® report speaks eloquently on understanding cloud data management architecture and approach to decide the landing zone of the databases and data fabric. 

This leads to a critical IT architecture design consideration of interdependent applications exchanging data, data locality, latency study with location preferences, especially for geo regulations and compliances. It results in the need for hybrid data management architecture. The focus should be on adoption of architecture that delivers cloud experience, agility, and modern data management with cost-efficiency, data analytics, and SLAs. Organizations need a new, right-cloud, API-first, and application-first approach, even for database management, to thrive in this DevOps era.

We have already seen the impact of Exadata consolidating Oracle instances in a private cloud on business outcomes, employee productivity, and instances consolidation. According to Oracle, 77% of global 100 enterprises have leveraged Exadata to deliver business agility. However, as per overall market share study by Enlyft, Oracle Exadata covers only 4% of the total addressable market. The rest of the DB engines such as MS SQL, Open-source databases can also run on similar cloud platforms. There is clear increase in cloud DB services with huge public cloud DBPaaS growth for Postgres, NoSQl and next-gen DBs while still leaving a large hybrid cloud market.

When modernizing database architecture, organizations should evaluate whether the new database solution:

• Enhances time to value and business agility
• Helps maximize uptime and security
• Brings operational efficiency and reduced costs
• Delivers performance-driven, secure, scalable, and a true “outcome-based” experience
• Delivers cloud scale and intelligent automation for traditional and container DBs
• Is application aligned with an efficient data layer to release and scale applications

Wipro's Digital Database Platform Services (DDPS) offers high-performance, scale-out environments and delivers heterogeneous database cloud environments. It supports key business goals such as highly responsive applications, accelerated time to market, and simplified data management. It delivers immediate cost benefits by consolidating multiple database engines on one platform, optimizing license costs, opportunity to migrate to open-source DBs like Postgres and better use of DBAs’ time. By integrating Wipro’s accelerators like ServiceTheatre™ in DDPS, it delivers autonomous operations and empowers the developers, DBAs and DevOps teams to perform overall process automation by easy API callable services.

Intel innovation is multiplying solution effectiveness for the infrastructure refresh, cost optimization, transformation projects, and deployments specially for core IT and cloud use cases. The infrastructure solution powered by Intel innovation delivers agility, scalability, simplicity, and operational efficiency. DDPS with Intel offers configurations using Intel Optane persistent memory, increasing both performance and memory capacity while maintaining data persistence, at a significantly lower cost than DRAM.  Additional DB consolidation, enabling mission critical workloads are other benefits which we bring with this reference architecture.

The competitive advantage for enterprises lies in speed and quality of innovation, data security, compliance, and developer productivity. A hybrid database cloud architecture that is fit for the new data, application and DevOps demands is a key aspect to achieve this. Organizations determined to thrive in the digital transformation and data-driven era need to invest in transforming their database estate on priority.

Gartner Mind the Gaps in DBMS Cloud Migration to Avoid Cost and Performance Issues, Robert Thanaraj, Henry Cook, Rick Greenwald, September 10, 2020

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