Private Database Cloud – The Next Big Storm?

Everyone knows IaaS, SaaS, PaaS - but is DBaaS the next big storm? Who’s it for, and why would anyone bother?

When you cut the hype out of Cloud, and want to know the difference between a Private (internal) Cloud and Virtualisation, the core difference is the Chargeback mechanism. The ability to spin up resources and resell it back to your IT end users

DBaaS is a paradigm where end users (e.g. DBA’s, Developers, Project Leads, Engineers) can request database services, consume it for the lifetime of the project, then automatically return the de-provisioned environment back to the resource pool.

So why bother? The key reasons are cost savings and agility.

Take a large Telco or Energy firm. Typically 200 to 2000 odd databases floating around, in the datacentre, this could amount to dozens of racks and up to £50m investment in software licensing, hardware and datacentre space.

This is significant cost worthy of lengthy boardroom discussions.

DBaaS in this scenario would mean consolidating all these instances and re-utilising existing licenses multiple times.

Can it be done? Yes.

A major project for us was to consolidate 211 physical servers and 532 Oracle database instances into 52 blades and 6 racks. 75% reduction in footprint meant halving their Oracle Licensing costs and increased database provisioning time from 8 days to under 10 hours. ROI less than 13 months.

No longer were Oracle Enterprise licenses floating about unused, 2 rows of datacentre space was freed up and no longer was the database platform a blocker to new projects for end users.

Private Database Cloud is a reality and has value in the market place. In a recent Linked In survey DSP conducted, Database in the Cloud was seen as having the greatest impact to the database community by a large margin.

DBaaS is not just for the global enterprises. Mid-sized firms can see relevant returns. We have seen NGO’s, Transport firms and egaming sectors deploying DBaaS. If a mid-sized company is reliant on database technology, has delays in their non-prod environments due to provisioning then a private database cloud environment could be an answer.