Moving to the Cloud offers Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) users a tremendous opportunity to simplify both the cost and complexity of ERP infrastructure management. To achieve these goals it is critical that you make the right choice between Public Cloud and Private Cloud. While Oracle E-Business Suite deployments can thrive on both the Public and Private Cloud, users must carefully assess how their choice of Cloud impacts their ability to meet their internal service level requirements.
Obviously, many factors go into this assessment. This article focuses on the role of redundancy in Public and Private Cloud deployments.
When it comes to redundancy, one of the first things to keep in mind is that performing a traditional “lift and shift” of a workload where there are no architectural modifications from an on-premises environment to one hosted on the Cloud most likely will not meet these requirements.
For example, while Public Cloud providers offer SLAs (Service Level Agreements), these SLAs do not cover the availability of individual servers or devices where your software resides. Public Cloud provider SLAs typically cover the facility, or to use the AWS term – Availability Zone. That means the Public Cloud provider is not guaranteeing the specific server your Oracle EBS solution is running on will be available. Instead, they’re guaranteeing that some of the servers the provider has deployed in that facility or Availability Zone will be available to run your environment leaving it to the customer to determine how to best allocate the workload to the available resources.
If you’re considering moving Oracle EBS to a Public Cloud, you must architect your deployment with that SLA in mind. For example, IT architects need to focus on things like zone replication for storage, host auto-restart on failure, and using load balancers to distribute software components across hosts in different zones to ensure availability.
Stated simply, Public Cloud providers are not providing you with hardware level redundancy, they are providing redundancy at the data center or Availability Zone level.
Traditional on-premises tools such as vMotion and block storage replication are not available in the Public Cloud further complicating matters. Even at the server level, redundant hardware components such as network interfaces and SAN controllers are not available in the Public Cloud as hardware is mainly selected based on providing the lowest cost to maximize volume which often comes at the expense of hardware redundancy.
In contrast, if you move Oracle E-Business Suite to a Private Cloud, it is likely that you will retain access to those tools and higher levels of hardware redundancy. In that sense, if your business requirements dictate that you need to guarantee availability at the hardware level, the Private Cloud might be a better choice for you.
If the cost savings offered by a Public Cloud outweigh the business need for hardware-level redundancy, then pay careful attention to re-architecting based on Availability Zone-level redundancy. The key to doing that successfully is to focus on fault-tolerance at the application level instead of the platform level.
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