Minimize Cost and Maximize Benefits: Move Your Oracle Database Standard Edition to Oracle Autonomous Database

Shifting data, databases, and applications from on-premises environments to the cloud is accelerating as cloud technology evolves to support business-critical applications for all types and sizes of organizations. Like you, many of our customers have started to make this shift and are evaluating different options for taking their on-premises Oracle Database workloads to the cloud. There are many factors to evaluate before taking the first step of your cloud journey.

Learn more about benefits gained by upgrading Oracle Database Standard Edition to Autonomous Database in the cloud

Many organizations that run Oracle Database Standard Edition on-premises for OLTP, analytical, or mixed workloads are considering upgrading to a fully managed Oracle Autonomous Database in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) or consolidating many databases using Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer in their data centers. Within this context, let’s look at the business and technology benefits.

Why Migrate to Oracle Autonomous Database?

There are several compelling reasons for moving your on-premises Oracle Database Standard Edition to Autonomous Database in the cloud:

◉ Autonomous operations: As a fully managed service, Autonomous Database eliminates the vast majority of labor-intensive manual DBA tasks. It uses machine learning and decades of production-proven best practices to optimize performance and availability. Autonomous Database delivers a fully autonomous experience that includes automatic database tuning, scaling, patching, and securing capabilities. As a result, Autonomous Database doesn’t require extensive database administrator and infrastructure management expertise, so it reduces operational costs and allows resources to be applied to more strategic business priorities. Built-in autonomous capabilities such as Oracle APEX and AutoML accelerate application development cycles and shorten the time-to-first-revenue for new products and services. 

◉ Advanced features:

     ◉ Moving to Autonomous Database delivers industry-first capabilities that are architected to solve pervasive user problems that require expert-level administrators to perform manual database diagnostic, performance tuning, capacity planning, manual backups, and security tasks. Autonomous Database capabilities that are unavailable with Oracle Database Standard Edition specifically eliminate these and many other problems. Instead, machine learning tunes database performance in real-time, makes sure patches are correctly applied without disruption automatically, detects and remediates unauthorized intruders as soon as they try to access your data, and scales performance and capacity up and down based on demand—all without interrupting operations.

     ◉ That’s not all. The Oracle Autonomous Database includes all of the features/functionality of the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, many of which are not available in Standard Edition environments. Capabilities such as Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), multiple container databases (CDB), partitioning, compression, parallel query, in-memory columnar format, advanced analytics and more. And you can get Autonomous Database in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) or in the comfort and convenience of your own data center on Exadata Cloud@Customer.

◉ Latest infrastructure: Your current on-premises hardware may be several years old. You may also be reaching the end of its maintenance period or lifecycle. Autonomous Database running in OCI data centers is a better option than refreshing your current hardware because: (1) there is no hardware investment, and you pay only for the resources that you use in a subscription service; and (2) Autonomous Database runs on Oracle Exadata infrastructure that is specifically and uniquely architected for optimal Oracle Database performance in the cloud. Customers with extensive Standard Edition deployments combined with data sovereignty concerns can also move to Autonomous Database by running it on Exadata Cloud@Customer installed in their data centers or in co-location facilities such as Equinix.

◉ Higher performance: Oracle  Autonomous Database is production-proven to deliver better application performance. Autonomous Database uses advanced Exadata capabilities such as Smart Scan query offloading, Smart Flash Cache, and Automatic Indexing that are not available with Oracle Database Standard Edition to optimize OLTP, analytics, and mixed workload performance. By optimizing SQL queries and offloading data-intensive and compute-intensive workloads to intelligent Exadata storage servers, queries run much faster. This means that workloads require fewer vCPU-seconds to complete, resulting in lower costs.

◉ Consistent data protection and security: Applying the latest software patch is often easier said than done, particularly when you need to patch your entire stack of server, storage, and networking infrastructure in addition to Oracle Database itself. Patching self-managed databases and infrastructure is often delayed by more than three months after patches are available because of the complexity of testing the compatibility of patches from multiple vendors. Delays in patching expose customer databases to security vulnerabilities even when there is a known way to prevent them. Autonomous Database automatically and non-disruptively applies the latest security patches across the database stack as soon as they are available.

◉ High Availability: Autonomous Database provides more than 99.95% availability using fully redundant Exadata infrastructure combined with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Autonomous Data Guard, automatic backups, and automated failure detection and failover in OCI.

◉ Automatic Scaling: Autonomous Database automatically scales vCPU consumption up and down based on current workload requirements—not on some estimate of what peak resources may be at some distant time in the future. Customers often oversize both cloud and on-premises architectures because they want to avoid the downtime and costs associated with upgrading them. Autonomous Database in OCI and on Exadata Cloud@Customer eliminates downtime by enabling online resource scaling, avoiding the problem of over-provisioning by automatically optimizing both performance and cost. Conventional on-premises systems clearly don’t allow you to scale resource consumption online, but most database cloud services don’t allow you to do it either. With per-second-billing on Autonomous Database, the end result is that you only pay for the resources you use, not what you think you may use in the future.

Use BYOL to Lower Your TCO

For a CFO or CIO, lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) by migrating to the cloud is critically important. Moving to the public cloud frees organizations from paying for hardware and data center-related costs, such as power, cooling, data center networking, and physical security. Migrating to Autonomous Database can also cut database administration costs up to 80% with automation of database operations and tuning. In addition, automatic scaling can reduce runtime costs, billing you only for the minimum resources required at any given time.

Even when comparing Autonomous Database to other general-purpose cloud architectures, research by Wikibon’s David Floyer concluded that migrating to Autonomous Database for transaction processing results in lowers total IT costs by 48% when compared to on-premises systems and cuts the expected cost of downtime by up to 70%. This is because Autonomous Database’s architecture delivers more performance, ultra-low latency, high levels of consolidation, lower downtime, and faster recovery.

While considering TCO, note that Oracle offers Oracle Bring Your Own License (BYOL) that can significantly reduce costs. With this BYOL program, you can accelerate your cloud migration journey by applying licenses that you own for on-premises software to equivalent, highly automated services in OCI. In the case of this blog’s migration scenario, the BYOL program offers substantial cost savings, providing a 76% discount off the price of Autonomous Database with License Included. Whether you bring Oracle Database Standard Edition licenses or Oracle Database Enterprise Edition licenses to Autonomous Database, you get the same 76% discount, so bringing Standard Edition is particularly attractive.

For example, NEC Nexsolutions took advantage of this BYOL program and moved their retail application to Autonomous Database from on-premises Oracle Database Standard Edition. In addition to the cost-savings from BYOL, running Autonomous Database for a transactional processing workload on a dedicated Exadata environment in OCI resulted in improved security for NEC Nexsolutions, as well as access to autonomous functions, including security threat detection and remediation capabilities.

Reduced Administration Efforts = Increased Opportunities and Lower TCO

As mentioned above, Autonomous Database enables organizations to save database administration costs by up to 80% because it is a fully managed service. It eliminates the time IT personnel spend on operational tasks such as provisioning, scaling, tuning, backups, and preparing for failover, allowing them to spend more time on strategic business priorities. Clearly, organizations should be sure to include the impact of saved labor costs in their TCO calculations.

Lowering Cloud Migration Risks and Costs

Migrations of any kind can be complex, risky, and costly. Oracle offers cloud engineering resources and free technical tools that reduce the complexity of Oracle Database migrations from on-premises to OCI while avoiding unnecessary costs.

With Oracle Cloud Lift Services, your IT teams can execute accelerated cloud migrations based on guidance from dedicated Oracle Cloud engineers. These specialists can provide expert insight into planning, architecting, prototyping, and managing your Oracle migrations. Even better, these resources are offered at no additional cost to all existing and new Oracle Cloud customers worldwide.

Oracle also offers two free technical options for migration: Zero Downtime Migration and OCI Database Migration Service. Zero Downtime Migration is an installable tool that provides a simplified and automated migration with zero to close-to-zero downtime. It supports migration between a wide range of Oracle Database source and target configurations, such as migration from on-premises Oracle Database Standard Edition to Autonomous Database. OCI Database Migration Service, on the other hand, is a managed OCI service based on Zero Downtime Migration. It migrates Oracle databases to OCI with zero to close-to-zero downtime and offers an intuitive user interface that enables a simplified self-service migration experience. You can choose your migration solution based on our business requirements.

Additional Benefits that Future-Proof your Cloud Investment

Moving your existing workload from on-premises Oracle Database Standard Edition to Oracle Autonomous Database gives you additional benefits that future-proof your cloud investment.

Take performance. NEC Nexsolutions saw workloads on Autonomous Database run more than five times faster than before. Autonomous Database delivers low latency and high throughput by using Exadata’s database-optimized hardware, automated tuning, and indexing. Higher performance leads to many benefits for internal and external service consumers, including shorter processing time for important business transactions, the ability to serve more customers, improving customer satisfaction with increased responsiveness, faster remediation of problems, and more. As noted earlier, shorter processing times also reduce cloud consumption costs since you pay only for resources used.

Autonomous Database improves your developers’ productivity as they enhance and expand your organization’s business applications. As a converged database that runs transactional as well as analytic and data warehouse workloads, Autonomous Database enables simplified and agile application development and offers a wide range of capabilities. In-database machine learning (ML) algorithms, support for a variety of data types (e.g. JSON, XML, relational, spatial, graph, IoT, text and blockchain) and REST APIs allow development teams to create advanced applications without having to integrate multiple services. Autonomous Database also offers Oracle APEX Application Development for no-code/low-code application development.

Oracle Cloud Native Services like Container Engine for Kubernetes enables developers to rapidly build and extend modern applications using a microservices architecture that integrates database functionality. Although some of the capabilities mentioned are also available with Oracle Database Standard Edition, access to a wide variety of OCI services lets developers concentrate on innovation without worrying about development tools and manual services integration.

Source: oracle.com