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Move your Oracle Database Standard Edition to Oracle Autonomous Database to Save Money and get more Benefits

Posted by Marbenz Antonio on May 18, 2022

As cloud technology advances to enable business-critical applications for all types and sizes of enterprises, the migration of data, databases, and apps from on-premises settings to the cloud is quickening. Many of our customers, like you, have begun to make this transition and are evaluating their choices for moving their on-premises Oracle Database workloads to the cloud. There are several variables to consider before starting on your cloud journey.

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

Why Upgrade to Oracle Autonomous Database?

There are some convincing reasons to migrate your Oracle Database Standard Edition on-premises to Autonomous Database in the cloud:

• Autonomous operations: Autonomous Database, being a fully managed service, removes the huge majority of labor-intensive manual DBA activities. It optimizes performance and availability by using machine learning and decades of production-proven best practices. Autonomous Database provides a completely self-contained experience that includes automated database tuning, scaling, patching, and security features. As a result, Autonomous Database does not need substantial database administrator and infrastructure management knowledge, lowering operating expenses and freeing up resources for more vital business goals. Autonomous features built within new products and services, such as Oracle APEX and AutoML, improve application development cycles and reduce time-to-first-revenue.
• Advance features: 
  • Moving to Autonomous Database provides industry-first features that are designed to tackle persistent user problems that need expert-level administrators doing manual database diagnostics, performance tuning, capacity planning, manual backups, and security tasks. These and other issues are clearly stated by Autonomous Database features that are not accessible with Oracle Database Standard Edition. Instead, machine learning optimizes database performance in real-time, ensures patches are applied correctly and without disruption, detects and remediates unauthorized intruders as soon as they attempt to access your data, and scales performance and capacity up and down based on demand—all without disrupting operations.
  • That isn’t everything. The Oracle Autonomous Database contains all of the features and capabilities of the Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, including several that are not accessible in Standard Edition situations. Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), multiple container databases (CDB), partitioning, compression, parallel query, in-memory columnar format, sophisticated analytics, and other features are available. You may also receive Autonomous Database on Exadata Cloud@Customer in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) or in the comfort and convenience of your own data center.
• Latest infrastructure: Your on-premises devices might be several years old. Its maintenance period or lifetime may likewise be coming to an end. 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 operates on Oracle Exadata infrastructure that is specially and uniquely architected for the best Oracle Database performance in the cloud. Customers with substantial Standard Edition installations and data sovereignty concerns can also migrate to Autonomous Database by operating it on Exadata Cloud@Customer in their data centers or co-location facilities like Equinix.
• Higher performance: Oracle Autonomous Database has been shown in the field to improve application performance. Autonomous Database optimizes OLTP, analytics, and mixed workload performance by utilizing strong Exadata technologies like Smart Scan query offloading, Smart Flash Cache, and Automatic Indexing, which are not available in Oracle Database Standard Edition. Queries are substantially quicker when SQL queries are optimized and data-intensive and compute-intensive workloads are offloaded to intelligent Exadata storage servers. Workloads will take fewer vCPU-seconds to complete, resulting in decreased expenses.
• Consistent data protection and security: Applying the most recent software patch is usually easier said than done, especially when you need to patch your complete stack of server, storage, and networking infrastructure in addition to Oracle Database. Because of the difficulties of evaluating the compatibility of patches from different vendors, patching self-managed databases and infrastructure is sometimes delayed by more than three months after updates are released. Delays in patching expose consumer databases to security vulnerabilities, even when a workaround is available. When new security patches become available, Autonomous Database automatically and non-disruptively deploys them throughout the database stack.
• High availability: Autonomous Database achieves more than 99.95% availability by combining completely redundant Exadata infrastructure with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Autonomous Data Guard, automatic backups, and automated failure detection and failover in OCI.
• Automatic scaling: Autonomous Database adjusts vCPU use up and down depending on actual workload requirements, not on some speculative prediction of peak resources at some distant period in the future. Customers frequently outgrow both cloud and on-premises infrastructures to minimize the downtime and expense associated with upgrades. Autonomous Database in OCI and Exadata Cloud@Customer minimizes downtime by enabling online resource scalability and preventing over-provisioning by automatically optimizing both performance and cost. Typical on-premises systems obviously do not allow online resource consumption, and most database cloud services do not let it either. With Autonomous Database’s per-second pricing, you only pay for the resources you use, not what you anticipate you might need in the future.

Use BYOL to Lower Your TCO

Lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) by shifting to the cloud is vital for a CFO or CIO. Moving to the public cloud eliminates the need for enterprises to pay for hardware and data center-related expenditures such as electricity, cooling, data center networking, and physical security. By automating database operations and monitoring, migration to Autonomous Database can save database management expenses by up to 80%. Furthermore,  automatic scaling can reduce runtime costs by charging you only for the resources that are necessary at any given time.

Even when comparing Autonomous Database to other general-purpose cloud architectures, Wikibon’s David Floyer found that migrating to Autonomous Database for transaction processing reduces total IT costs by 48% when compared to on-premises systems and reduces the expected cost of downtime by up to 70%. This is due to the design of the Autonomous Database, which provides increased speed, ultra-low latency, high degrees of consolidation, decreased downtime, and faster recovery.

When calculating TCO, keep in mind that Oracle provides Oracle Bring Your Own License (BYOL), which can significantly lower expenses. With this BYOL initiative, you may speed your cloud migration path by converting on-premises software licenses to similar, highly automated services in OCI. In the instance of this blog’s migration scenario, the BYOL program provides a 76% reduction on the price of Autonomous Database with License Included. You get the same 76% savings whether you bring Oracle Database Standard Edition or Oracle Database Enterprise Edition licenses to Autonomous Database, so bringing Standard Edition is very appealing.

For example, NEC Nexsolutions used this BYOL tool to migrate their retail application from on-premises Oracle Database Standard Edition to Autonomous Database. Aside from 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, such as security threat detection and remediation capabilities.

Reduced Administration Efforts = Increased Opportunities and Lower TCO

Because it is a completely managed service, Autonomous Database helps enterprises to save up to 80% on database administration expenses. It reduces the time IT professionals spend on operational operations like provisioning, scaling, tuning, backups, and failover preparation, allowing them to focus on strategic business goals. Clearly, businesses must account for the impact of reduced labor costs in their TCO calculations.

Lowering Cloud Migration Risks and Costs

Any type of migration may be complicated, difficult, and expensive. Oracle provides cloud engineering services and free technical tools to simplify Oracle Database migrations from on-premises to OCI while minimizing unnecessary expenses.

With Oracle Cloud Lift Services, your IT teams can perform rapid cloud migrations with the help of Oracle Cloud professionals. These experts can advise you on Oracle migration strategy, architecture, prototyping, and management. Even better, all existing and new Oracle Cloud customers globally have access to these resources at no additional cost.

Oracle also provides two free migration technology options: Zero Downtime Migration and OCI Database Migration Service. Zero Downtime Migration is a solution that may be installed to allow a simplified and automatic migration with zero to near-zero downtime. It allows for migration between a wide range of Oracle Database sources and target configurations, such as from on-premises Oracle Database Standard Edition to Autonomous Database. OCI Database Migration Service, on the other hand, is a managed OCI service that utilizes Zero Downtime Migration. It migrates Oracle databases to OCI with little to no downtime and provides a simple user interface for a quick self-service migration experience. You can select a migration option depending on your company’s needs.

Additional Benefits that Future-Proof Your Cloud Investment

Moving your existing workload from on-premises Oracle Database Standard Edition to Oracle Autonomous Database provides you with additional benefits that will protect your cloud investment in the future.

Consider performance. Workloads on NEC Nexsolutions’ Autonomous Database operated more than five times quicker than previously. By utilizing Exadata’s database-optimized technology, automatic tuning, and indexing, Autonomous Database achieves low latency and high throughput. Higher performance results in multiple advantages for internal and external service consumers, including faster processing time for critical business transactions, the ability to serve more customers, improved customer satisfaction through increased responsiveness, faster-resolving issues, and more. As previously stated, quicker processing times minimize cloud usage costs since you only pay for resources consumed.

Autonomous Database increases the efficiency of your developers as they upgrade and grow your organization’s business applications. Autonomous Database, being a converged database that supports transactional, analytic, and data warehousing workloads, enables easier and faster software development and provides a wide range of features. In-database machine learning (ML) algorithms, support for a wide range of data formats (e.g., JSON, XML, relational, geographic, graph, IoT, text, and blockchain), and REST APIs enable development teams to build sophisticated applications without the need to link different services. Oracle APEX Application Development is also available from Autonomous Database for no-code/low-code application development.

Oracle Cloud Native Services, such as Container Engine for Kubernetes, allow developers to easily create and expand advanced applications by using a microservices design that incorporates database capabilities. Although some of the listed features are also accessible with Oracle Database Standard Edition, having access to a wide range of OCI services allows developers to focus on innovation rather than development tools and manual service integration.

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