The recent changes caused by the virus and economic meltdown affected almost everybody in the world. We are all now going through a difficult period of our history, and when many companies are struggling to survive, the other thrive and boost production. In such volatile environment, it becomes more and more important to be able to adapt the IT environment to immediate business needs quickly.
Continue reading “Cloud and how it might help at difficult times.”Category: Cloud
Exadata Cloud at Customer – number of active CPUs and adding a new database.
Let’s imagine a typical working day, and you are getting a request to add a new database to your Exadata Cloud at Customer (ExaCC). If you are not familiar with the product, you can read about it in detail here. In short, it is an Exadata machine with a cloud interface, something like Oracle Exadata Cloud Service, but with the hardware installed in your datacenter.
Continue reading “Exadata Cloud at Customer – number of active CPUs and adding a new database.”Desktop in the cloud? Easy.
This is a difficult time for everyone, even if you are used to working most of the time from home, airport, cafe, or any other place. The problem is not only how good you are managing your time but sometimes in network reliability and throughput. When so many people work from home, and so many kids are trying to watch streaming services at the same time, your home network might be under severe pressure. In such a case, a remotely hosted desktop product could be the solution.
Continue reading “Desktop in the cloud? Easy.”Is Oracle cloud only for Oracle?
Several days ago, discussing public cloud solutions and competition between different providers, one of the people mentioned that Oracle Cloud is just for Oracle products. At the same time, AWS and Azure are more vendor agnostic. I was a bit surprised by that statement but it appeared that several other people shared the same view. I decided to write the blog and show what options Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has for different workloads.
Continue reading “Is Oracle cloud only for Oracle?”Oracle OCI Database service storage allocation.
Today I would like to discuss the block storage allocation in a VM based Oracle DBCS system. Several times in different conversations it was mentioned that the block storage will be allocated with triple redundancy on the ASM level. Let’s check it out.
Continue reading “Oracle OCI Database service storage allocation.”
Linux LVM for Oracle Database on OCI
Oracle Database as a service (DBCS) on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) had been traditionally built based on Oracle Grid Infrastructure with ASM as the main storage layer for the database, however Oracle recently has started to offer a Linux LVM as the storage alternative. Which option is the better alternative? Let’s review some of the differences between the two options.
Oracle OCI and Azure inter-cloud link. Good option for a hybrid cloud.
Not long time ago Oracle and Microsoft announced about new level of cooperation in the public cloud interlinking their clouds providing ability to use each of the cloud where they are the best. For example it allows to run application on Azure and use an Oracle database in the Oracle OCI. It was possible before for some regions but would involve multiple steps on both sides involving a 3d party network provider to interlink Oracle FastConnect and Azure ExpressRoute. Now it can be done using Azure and Oracle OCI interfaces only. The option so far exists only for US Washington DC area where you have OCI Ashburn and Azure Washington DC regions. I tried it and found it working but not without some surprises. Continue reading “Oracle OCI and Azure inter-cloud link. Good option for a hybrid cloud.”
Keep money in check in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
With any cloud environment, it becomes easy to start a new resource whether it is a database or a compute instance. It is like walking to a giant department store with unlimited credit on your card. Too often we find that somebody has fired a new instance and left it forgotten to run over holidays or weekend. Sometimes it is left by purpose to run some tasks but in many cases, it is just forgotten. That ease of consumption of cloud resources can lead to unexpectedly high bills by the end of the month. It would be very much helpful to have some kind of visibility and control of our spendings there. In the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), we have some tools and ways how to be notified about the usage of the resources. In this post, I am going to talk about the budget tool and monitoring. Continue reading “Keep money in check in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.”
Oracle Active DataGuard on AWS RDS
Reading the latest updates and news I found that AWS has introduced a read-only replica for their AWS RDS for Oracle with the Active DataGuard technology behind that. It allowed clients offload reporting and some read-only activity to the standby freeing the primary Oracle database for transactions. It was possible to use the Data Guard before but only on EC2 type installation of Oracle and it was supposed to be fully configured managed by the customers. Continue reading “Oracle Active DataGuard on AWS RDS”
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure multi-factor authentication
For some time we didn’t have a multi-factor authentication in the Oracle cloud and those short-lived numeric codes were one of the best way to reinforce your protection and prevent a bad actor to break your credentials. It is not 100% protection but it is well better than a username and a password. Just recently I read in the Oracle Infrastructure cloud blog about new native multi-factor authentication for Identity and Access Management (IAM) system on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Of course, I went directly to my account and started to test it. Continue reading “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure multi-factor authentication”