Most large and mid-sized organisations in South Africa are likely to follow blue-chip financial services companies, telecommunications operators, and food and beverage manufacturers that have already joined international organisations such as Facebook, Procter & Gamble, and Deutsche Bank in slashing IT costs by virtualising their databases.
So says Britehouse VPS Database and Technology Director, Dr Manfred Hertenberger. "We anticipated this trend two years ago, when we entered a partnership with Delphix, the first company to bring to market software that enables virtualisation of data, addressing the bottlenecks in application life cycles.
"We already have several clients benefiting from Delphix's ability to clone and provision databases in seconds. But there are many more organisations that should be taking advantage of these capabilities to cut costs, increase efficiencies, and boost security."
Dr Hertenberger points out that organisations make multiple copies of their production databases for the purposes of development, support, user acceptance testing, training, reporting, and staging.
"This creates significant cost in terms of the resources and effort needed to manage several physical production copies. Storage of all the copies is an additional substantial overhead. And, then there are the weeks of co-ordinated effort across network, system, database, and application teams needed to provision just one database copy.
"All of this limits the benefits organisations should be getting from virtualising their IT platforms. Deploying databases on virtualised servers provides host level efficiencies, but does not address the bigger storage overhead or the operational bottlenecks at the database layer. And, of course, many databases still reside in legacy systems that don't lend themselves to virtualisation.
"Without Delphix, it's impossible to address all the issues cost-effectively and intuitively, as should happen in a virtualised landscape."
Delphix uses standard network capabilities to create a single virtual copy of production database files and logs. Even at this early stage of the process, through intelligent filtering and compression, Delphix delivers up to a 75% data reduction.
Thereafter, Delphix reduces storage overhead by a further 10% by requesting and recording only changed data and log blocks, thereby continuously and automatically keeping the database up to date. A full database can be provisioned in a matter of seconds rather than weeks.
Delphix's ability to instantly provision or refresh full databases from any point in time translates into an increase of up to 20 times in manpower efficiency around making and managing database copies.
By eliminating the proliferation of physical copies, Delphix also reduces risk and enhances privacy and security by up to 10 times.
"It's no surprise that half the Fortune 500 companies use Delphix," Dr Hertenberger says. "But Delphix works just as well in the kind of large and mid-sized companies that dominate the South African economy. Best of all, it's available on an opex basis. So, organisations can pay for it via the savings it generates."
Delphix VP & General Manager EMEA, Iain Chidgey, says Delphix chose to partner with Britehouse because of Britehouse's track record in the enterprise space, particularly in respect of large implementations of SAP and Microsoft.
"Although, once it's installed, Delphix is both easy to use and works in seconds, an organisation's environment has to be prepared for Delphix. So the customer needs a company like Britehouse, that understands the underlying complexity of enterprise landscapes and the processes involved in virtualising them, to help them get to grips with how Delphix will change their IT operations, and then to plan accordingly.
"Also, Britehouse has some of the best virtualisation talent in South Africa. They know what virtualisation should deliver. So, they can help an organisation integrate its approach and processes so as to get full virtualisation benefits across its infrastructure, hardware, and applications."
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