For years, enterprises have been migrating to the cloud to minimize their costs and leverage the flexibility, scalability, and innovation they need to remain competitive. In a post-pandemic world where remote work is the new normal, cloud migration has taken on even greater urgency, but many organizations are held back by legacy line-of-business (LOB) applications. These old apps are mission-critical, but they weren’t designed to run in the cloud. Attempting to migrate them anyway is an expensive and highly risky proposition. Rewriting or replacing them isn’t realistic, either.
Google Cloud Platform’s Bare Metal Solution solves this problem by enabling organizations to run specialized workloads with specific configurations, such as apps that require an Oracle Database, close to GCP. Bare Metal Solution provides OEM hardware, hardware support, integrated billing, and low-latency access to all GCP services.
Why run your Oracle apps on Google Cloud’s Bare Metal solution?
1. Complete deployment support
Other cloud providers’ compute environments do not support the older versions of Oracle Database that many legacy LOB apps depend on. Oracle’s licensing restrictions prohibit them from supporting Oracle features that your apps require to run, such as Real Application Clusters and In-Memory.
GCP Bare Metal Solution lets organizations keep running older versions of Oracle DB, along with packaged apps and the hypervisor of their choice, in a single-tenanted, dedicated instance. In addition to standalone applications, Bare Metal Solution servers can be used with application native or database native clustering technologies for high availability. A familiar management interface greatly reduces the learning curve for existing IT personnel and minimizes the need for new tools or processes.
2. Reduce Oracle licensing costs by 50% compared with AWS/Azure
Oracle’s products are licensed using a metric called a Licensing CPU. The Licensing CPU metric is converted to how the server divides its physical resources, such as by core, vCPU, thread, or another method. Oracle maintains these mappings outside of the Oracle Licensing and Services Agreement (OLSA), individual Order Documents (ODs), and the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table.
One Licensing CPU maps to only ½ physical core in AWS or Azure, but 1 full core in Google’s Bare Metal Solution, which means that GCP customers get the same amount of compute while purchasing half as many licenses. Further, the Intel servers that Google Cloud uses for Bare Metal Solution enable customers to map a single Licensing CPU to two physical cores.
3. Reduce deployment complexity & risk
Co-location offerings are extremely costly and highly complex to set up, which increases the risk to critical migration projects. GCP Bare Metal Solution minimizes deployment risk by using Oracle-certified hardware, so most apps can be migrated with little or no change. Bare Metal Solution’s migration tools reduce deployment complexity by automatically provisioning applications and relational databases, configuring operating systems, and setting up services such as backups and monitoring.
Further, by switching to Bare Metal Solution, organizations consolidate their number of vendors from 7 to only 1, reducing billing complexity while minimizing their costs.
4. Deploy serverless backups & disaster recovery
Oracle Database licenses (Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, and Standard Edition One) allow customers to run their database on an unlicensed computer up to four times in a given calendar year for purposes of testing physical copies of backups. However, this permission does not extend to any other data recovery method, such as remote mirroring, that involves copying or synchronizing Oracle program binary files.
Actifio, GCP’s embedded serverless disaster recovery (DR) solution, allows organizations to actively move their data files to NetApp storage without having to access Oracle binary files. This allows organizations to backup files onto GCP while remaining compliant with Oracle’s licensing requirements. Actifio’s one-click DR orchestration minimizes Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and operational burden, and administrators can use backups to rapidly provision database clones for test/dev and analytics in GCP.
Because Bare Metal Solution is co-located with Google Cloud, no ingress or egress charges are leveraged for data that moves between Bare Metal Solution and GCP within the same region.
5. Reduce operations costs & minimize dependency on Oracle
With Bare Metal Solution’s end-to-end infrastructure management, Google handles all provisioning, managing, and monitoring, so you can grow your business instead of your overhead. Because Bare Metal Solution seamlessly integrates with the rest of the GCP ecosystem, organizations can also reduce their dependency on Oracle by leveraging GCP services, such as BigQuery and CloudSQL for database operations. Organizations that migrate to BigQuery can reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 52% compared to other data warehouse alternatives.
6. Modernize in place, at your own pace
Bare Metal Solutions’ integration with the entire GCP platform enables organizations to gradually migrate and modernize their apps over time to take advantage of modern technology. Use Google Kubernetes Engine to run workloads in containers, use TensorFlow to develop and train machine learning models, or leverage AI building blocks to easily add sight, language, conversation, and structured data to applications.
Bare Metal Solution uses a subscription pricing model with no upfront costs. You choose right-sized hardware configurations based on your organization's needs, from as few as 16 cores up to 112 cores with 3 terabytes of DRAM, with the option to add capacity as your business needs change.
1 http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-factor-table-070634.pdf
2 https://www.oracle.com/assets/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf
3 https://services.google.com/fh/files/events/esg_economic_validation_migrating_to_google_bigquery.pdf
