Oracle Business Intelligence Data Warehouse Solutions on Sun

Today, companies increasingly need timely and accurate information to make critical business decisions and assess risks and opportunities in order to rapidly respond to market changes and stay competitive. Data warehouses are assuming a more strategic role in making these business decisions, with the challenges of delivering near real-time data, integrating applications to utilize results, and providing transparent access to systems that contain business-critical data.

Oracle delivers a comprehensive business intelligence solution to help manage, access, and analyze business data at the right time, and at a lower cost. Oracle believes the popularity of near real-time data warehousing is growing, and with it the need for integrated applications and portal-like access. A key benefit of Oracle's general-purpose database is that it is proven for large-scale on-line transaction processing, and therefore ideal for the emerging area of real-time data warehousing. With an extremely fast and highly scalable database as a platform, Oracle also offers solutions to make the data warehouse active with other applications, and dynamic with access to data throughout the enterprise.

Why Oracle on Sun

Oralce is the leading provider of applications and solutions for BIDW. Sun is the thought leader and the platform of choice for mission-critical computing. Together, Sun and Oracle create synergies that go beyond each company's individual capabilities. The Oracle and Sun alliance is one of the most comprehensive and collaborative in the industry, with the two companies running a substantial portion of their critical operations on each other's products. In addition, Sun and Oracle integrate products at the source code level, providing the best performance, reliability, scalability, and security possible for the combined solutions. And, with joint escalation centers, a Sun Oracle Application Technology Center, Sun BIDW Competency Center, Sun Business Intelligence Reference Architectures, and Sun Cluster software support for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Sun is ideal as a platform for Oracle BIDW solutions.

Sun provides the infrastructure to enable high availability, peak performance, and security to meet the needs of the most demanding near real-time BIDW workloads. Sun offers a wide choice of platforms with a combination of horizontal, vertical, and storage scalability with servers based on SPARC or Operon processors running the Solaris Operating System or Linux, as well as storage arrays, NAS, SANs, and tape libraries.

Sun Cluster Software for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC)

As data warehouses evolve from monolithic, specialty applications to business-critical application services, the need for clustering and high availability increases. For example, Oracle RAC could be used to provide a single database for both OLTP and data warehousing.

Sun Cluster software offers Oracle RAC applications world-class availability by helping to ensure the least possible downtime and data integrity in the event of a server failure. A wide choice of Sun server and storage solutions with integrated Solaris Volume Manager for Sun Cluster software also offers an extremely low total cost of ownership (TCO). In addition, support for Oracle RAC with Sun StorEdge QFS software provides the ability to manipulate RAC files on a shared file system to help support more systems and users. All of these Sun Cluster software features are designed to provide a highly available platform for Oracle RAC-based BIDW environments.

Sun Reference Architectures

Sun is constantly developing new reference architectures, including several for business intelligence and data warehousing. Sun Reference Architectures are designed to simplify the complexity of large IT systems by providing a solid, pretested, integrated, and documented infrastructure layer. Sun Reference Architecutres define the hardware and software components needed to build end-to-end solutions that meet specific business needs. Each Reference Architecture is designed, tested, and documented, so users can reduce the complexity, costs, and risks of deploying new technology in their enterprises. Sun's Reference Architectures combines: A documented multi-tiered architecture, recommended technology products from Sun and other vendors, and architecture, sizing, and implementation guides.

Sun BIDW Competency Center

Sun demonstrates its commitment to reducing costs and risk through its BIDW Competency Center in Menlo Park, California, where customers can test the performance and architecture of planned BIDW implementations. The state-of-the-art facility is replete with reference architectures and application scenarios to help identify how to maximize the benefits of industry-specific deployments. Two of the center's most popular services are the proof of concept (POC) and scalability testing, both offered free of charge.

BIDW Workshops and Services

Sun's Client Services provides a comprehensive portfolio of customer workshops, training, design services, and consulting to help implement end-to-end BIDW solutions.

Services include:

• BIDW Workshop and Assessment
• BIDW Planning and Configuration
• BIDW Architecture and Design
• BIDW Migration
• BIDW Performance Tuning
• BIDW Delivery

Conclusion

Few major coporations work together as closely as Sun and Oracle. Together, Oracle's powerful, general-purpose database and BIDW tools on Sun's highly scalable platforms, along with industry expertise and consulting services can help implement and deliver high-performance, low-cost, near real-time business intelligence data warehouses.

Get the details. www.sun.com/oracle