VIOLIN Insights

One of the services Collier IT offers to our customers is Oracle licensing optimization, especially at the core technology (Database) tier. Some of the triggers for this are mergers, acquisitions, license audits, or budget cuts.

All communications in an application stack generally take a few microseconds. Some take a few milliseconds which results in higher latency also known as long tail latency.

Collier IT customers have been embracing CISC-based solutions for a number of years, with chip architectures ranging from x86 to AMD to x64. Performance of these systems continues to improve with core count and memory size. Architectures vary from single systems with attached storage to converged infrastructure systems with extremely fast (and expensive) storage options.

Today we announced a really cool new product called the XVS 8. In a nutshell, we made the fastest enterprise storage in the world – faster. Speed, and by speed, I mean ultra-low latency, can do some amazing things. It does the obvious, it lets your applications run faster, increasing profitability and customer satisfaction. Lowering latency does another cool thing, it lets you consolidate your infrastructure.

As an Oracle database guy working at Violin Systems in Europe, I get exposed to some truly big, scary database platforms. Sometimes they are important (like the global PeopleSoft database for a well-known world-wide intergovernmental organization), sometimes they are critical (like the billing platform for 26 million cell phone users in Europe) and sometimes... you just can't talk about them.

Attend the December general meeting of the New York Oracle User Group and find out how to achieve top performance with LXC Linux Containers.

A couple of weeks ago, along with thousands of other people, I attended Oracle OpenWorld 2014 in San Francisco. There were lots of announcements and lots of opportunities to learn (especially at the excellent OakTable World conference-within-a-conference). My personal favourite session was Jeremiah Wilton's talk on running Oracle on Amazon Cloud Services - I think a whole essay could be written on Oracle's Cloud Licensing Policy. And as Steve Karam has already pointed out, the overwhelming message of OOW14 was cloud, cloud cloud. It seems that Larry no longer likes to talk about on-premise.

This year you could say that #transformation is the best hashtag for Oracle OpenWorld. News of Larry Ellison's stepping down as CEO of Oracle signals a change of season.

Suspend disbelief for a moment and ponder the following questions: What would your business look like if we made it economical to run your storage infrastructure at speeds closer to that of memory than that of disk storage? How fast would your applications run? What business models would it open up? How much competitive advantage can you gain?

SSD’s are like cordless phones and DVD’s.  They made an improvement on an existing technology but didn’t revolutionize its use.  In technology there is a difference between the concept of modernizing and revolutionizing.  Modernizing is finding a way to do the same thing, just a little bit faster or little bit easier.  Revolutionizing is either eliminating or vastly changing how something is done.