You Don’t Have to Divide – Just Rule the Database Workloads

In the digital economy, there is immense value in drawing real-time business insights from organizations’ own transactional systems. However, it is not uncommon for a business to wait several hours before actual sales report or the inventory statuses are made available.

Typically, enterprise IT divides business processes into online transaction processing (OLTP), batch and analytic/reporting workloads. In order to meet the performance and scalability needs of these workloads, IT teams built systems that are optimized to execute one or the other. This complex ‘divide and conquer’ approach for database workloads leads to both business and IT complexities. For example, complex queries involved in reporting workloads would require indexes to produce reports quickly but having too many indexes on a transactional table would cost OLTP performance.

One of the top reasons our customers choose us as they modernize their data centers is the value our comprehensive portfolio offers. With our All Flash storage, our customers not only reduce the batch reporting duration but also enable new business process workflows along with integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) solution.

The scale-out architecture of our storage systems enables them to consolidate multiple database workloads and comfortably deliver consistent performance to the applications. With virtual copies technologies, such as XtremIO Virtual Copies (XVC), database copies for workloads such as reporting and testing could be provisioned without traditional time overhead.

workloads

As shown above, with the full-featured AppSync Starter bundle, our customers are able to automate the entire workflow of making and provisioning application-consistent database copies in 3 simple steps:

  1. Centrally define source hosts and let AppSync automatically discover the databases.
  2. Customize the database cloning process to prepare the database for the target workload:
    1. AppSync allows administrators to add or modify database initialization parameters ideal for the target workload. Do you need to use a larger value for DB_FILE_MULTIBLOCK_READ_COUNT to improve IOs on table scan? No problem!
    2. AppSync can execute user scripts before making a copy or after mounting a database. Do you need to create that index required for your complex queries involved in reporting? No problem!
  3. With the ability to define service plans, administrators can automate the creation and deletion of virtual copies.

As decision-making windows shrink for most digital businesses, they require a different approach to retrieve information out of their own transactional systems. Storage plays a vital role in enabling data agility and with the right solution, IT teams can enable information flow that modern-day businesses require.

About the Author: Bala Chandrasekaran