Category: Oracle Magazine

Software. Hardware. Complete. by David A. Kelly
May 2010 : Oracle Magazine

The completion of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in January 2010 was big news for Sun customers, but it’s also big news for Oracle customers and enterprises in general. The combined assets of the two companies offer organizations an unsurpassed breadth of products from disk and storage systems to servers, database, middleware, applications, and management tools. The combination of Oracle’s enterprise software with Sun’s software, hardware, and storage systems provides a complete stack that can be integrated into solutions that are optimized for higher performance, improved reliability, and enhanced security. (See the “Delivering a Complete Technology Stack” sidebar for more information.)

“Having a complete stack is something that we’ve wanted for years,” says David Maitland, CIO and director of corporate services at Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE). “The combination of Oracle and Sun products now provides us a top-to-bottom, integrated, open-infrastructure stack.”

Based in the U.K., AWE is a government-owned, contractor-operated establishment charged with providing and maintaining warheads for the country’s nuclear deterrent. AWE’s employees conduct advanced scientific research and manage advanced design and production facilities.

The Virtual Enterprise by David A. Kelly
July 2010 : Oracle Magazine

When JP Morgan Chase acquired Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual over a 12-month period, it had to work hard and fast to integrate those large companies.

“Acquisitions impact the infrastructure layer in a big way, so you have to be constantly prepared to accommodate those customers and the new databases, especially when we’re talking huge mergers like Washington Mutual,” says Thiru Vadivelu, lead database architect at JP Morgan Chase. Vadivelu is part of the corporate systems infrastructure group within the company, which gathers requirements from the business units and designs infrastructure solutions to implement and support those requirements. Vadivelu himself manages the database architecture, performance, and capacity planning functions in corporate technology.

For Vadivelu and his corporate technology group, grid and virtualization technologies were a key part of the strategy for handling those challenges.