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Three-tier database architecture under threat

By Tracy Burrows, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 28 Feb 2014

The three-tier database architecture that has been in place for the past 25 years will be unsustainable in future, says Gary de Menezes, regional director at Oracle Africa.

De Menezes told the Oracle CXO Executive Forum in Sandton today that the model based on separate server, networking and storage layers could not meet the changing needs of enterprises.

"The rate of business and technology change has increased dramatically. Data volumes will have grown by over 50 times by 2020, what is the market leader today is a loss leader tomorrow. Businesses that fail to innovate fall behind. Yet enterprises need to keep innovating off the same cost base, amid challenges such as rising costs of power and labour and a variable exchange rate," he said.

"We challenge three-tier architecture as one that will not be sustainable going forward," he said. Enterprises need to move toward the engineered data centre to increase their storage footprint, manage and interrogate an uncontrollable explosion of data, and balance costs, said De Menezes.

This change, he noted, is being described as the third platform for data centres. "Oracle has invested heavily in R&D and now owns the IP of every layer from application to disk, collapsing every layer into a single engineered architecture that supports growth and innovation."

With early adopters reporting reductions of up to 30 times their storage footprint, a 20 - 30 times increase in performance and up to 40% reduction in their direct TCO, engineered architecture clearly supports innovation off a controlled cost base, he said. "It's time to simplify IT, reduce complexity and improve reliability," he said.

Also speaking at the event, Steuart Pennington, author and publisher of South Africa - The Good News, highlighted significant progress made in SA in 20 years of democracy, noting that much of this progress and growth had been driven by the private sector.

De Menezes, Nushendran Govender, principal sales consultant presales at Oracle; Ian Lewin, head of engineered solutions at Dimension Data Application Services, Rudolph Horn, GM Oracle at Dimension Data Application Services and Ravi Kumar Beldi, manager: IT Oracle ERP at the National Health Laboratory Services hosted a panel discussion focussing on practical strategies around engineered systems.

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