Salsaga Blog

OTTAWA, April 22 /PRNewswire/ — Database administrators (DBAs) and the enterprises that rely on the complex systems they manage face a host of challenging issues, many of them only dimly understood, posed by emerging or established business trends such as open-source software, virtualization, the greening of the data center, accelerating IT compliance obligations and the need for round-the-clock high availability, according to The Pythian Group, a global team of DBAs to which companies turn for the outsourced administration of their enterprise databases, that today issued its forecast of the most critical issues facing its customers.At the same time as end-users are grappling with the implications of this evolving business and technology environment, the major database vendors and the integrated service providers that often implement large deployments are both finding their traditional business and revenue models potentially undermined by these trends as well as by other factors Pythian has identified.Some of the major issues facing DBAs and their clients, along with Pythian’s take on them, are discussed below.Open-source softwareOpen-source alternatives such as MySQL are being universally adopted in the start-up and online communities and are also making inroads into more traditional applications, presenting novel opportunities for end-users and evident challenges for the incumbent vendors.”There simply are no dot-com start-ups deploying on anything other than MySQL, unless they’re ridiculously over-funded,” Pythian CEO Paul Vallee said. This is because the cost of a MySQL deployment can be deferred until it’s generating revenue, an obvious advantage for a start-up.”Meanwhile, we have customers in the offline world that are mandating MySQL implementations because they’re tired of paying the massive up-front costs to traditional database vendors,” Vallee added. “Or they’ve introduced something, like a blog on WordPress that is backed by MySQL, that suddenly makes it an imperative part of their infrastructure.”Virtualization and server consolidationWhether introduced to take advantage of economies of scale thanks to more robust hardware and software or to save energy and so green the data center, virtualization presents a massive, usually one-time, challenge for DBAs who must port their applications to the new configuration, and also undermines traditional licensing models based on a per-CPU pricing structure.”Obviously,” Vallee said, “It’s an advantage for outsourced options such as us that virtualization creates a huge surge in workload since we can help get the job done as the one-time task it is without the organization having to add permanent resources.”More critically, he noted, all the database vendors are struggling with creating a new pricing model now that multiple installations can be run on the same CPU, something that dynamites traditional per-CPU approaches. One exception to this, noted Pythian’s recently hired SQL Server expert Adam Machanic, is the Microsoft product. “SQL Server is licensed on a per-socket basis, which really lets companies take advantage of multi-core technology without breaking the bank,” he said.Federated architectureThe flip side of virtualization is a federated architecture, whereby companies take advantage of the ever-falling cost of hardware and software to run their applications across large numbers of servers, architecting the applications so a robust decision-making layer directs every task to the most convenient or available resource.Although it runs counter to the virtualization trend, “it can be a compelling approach for a start-up since it scales so readily,” Vallee said. “If you run out of capacity, just add the next server, update the algorithm and you’re done.” He added that MySQL enjoys an added advantage in such configurations because of its incremental approach to deployment costs. SQL Server also offers an advantage, said Machanic, is that its “peer-to-peer replication technology will position SQL Server 2008 as a major technological player in this area in the coming months.”Accelerating compliance obligationsComparing it to “an arms race dynamic,” Vallee said corporate IT compliance audits are becoming more demanding about certifying standards of care, with DBAs having to take on the burden of satisfying IT governance bodies that all is well.”We have several customers, such as Palm Coast Data that must abide by PCI regulations protecting credit-card data, or like MDS that have HIPAA obligations, so we know that every year the requirement gets more detailed in terms of what the DBA must provide,” he said. “If this happens to you, what do you do?”Some database vendors are reacting to this, added Machanic, by adding new features to their products to help companies deal with the overwhelming task of figuring out what’s happening on their servers. “For example, Microsoft is greatly extending SQL Server’s auditing capabilities in its forthcoming SQL Server 2008 version. However, even with the advanced tools provided by the vendors, setting up a proper auditing infrastructure and fully complying with regulations is a daunting task,” he said.Design for high availability is going mainstream”With more and more users distributing their applications across multiple server rooms, multiple data centers or several different locations around the globe, the need for high availability is going mainstream but the technologies are either missing from every vendor’s current feature set or are very expensive to deploy,” Vallee said. “The data tier isn’t nearly as robust as systems tiers that today quite readily achieve three-nines reliability and even higher.” He predicted the sector is headed for a disruption that may see more robust data sharding enabled through the cloud, using innovations such as Amazon’s SimpleDB, rather than via purchased applications.Two high-level business issues also have major implications for database vendors, their implementation partners and their customers.Uptake of Oracle 11g lags historic trendsPythian is not seeing the same pace of uptake for Oracle’s most recent release, 11g, as was experienced with previous releases, Vallee said. “After two quarters, we have only one customer out of more than 100 that is buying the new release and we don’t have anyone else clamouring for the added functionality it delivers.” Vallee said he believes Oracle was seen as being largely feature complete prior to 11g, and he suspects Oracle knows this. “Why else would they be buying companies like PeopleSoft and JD Edwards unless they knew their DB was feature complete? They’re investing in climbing higher and higher into the application value chain.”Procurement of IT service moving to supply managementWith more and more large enterprises deploying a best-practices approach to purchasing, responsibility for the procurement of IT services is moving from the IT department to the supply management department, with potentially grave implications for integrated service providers that bundle complete offerings, Vallee said.”It used to be a romance-driven approach,” he said, whereby vendors courted the IT department to make a sale. Now, in a “potentially disruptive trend,” major corporations will not procure IT services except through a supply-management process that requires a cost model for each vendor to be built, encourages multi-sourcing and discourages bundled offerings. He added that this is a promising trend for outsourced service providers like Pythian that now can present far more compelling cost-comparison cases. Such vendors may also experience vastly shortened sales cycles if they succeed at being named an approved vendor by the procurement process.For more information on the Pythian Group, visit . Pythian Group

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