The three-tier data centre architecture model that has been in place for the past 25 years will be unsustainable in future, says Gary de Menezes, regional director at Oracle Africa.

The three-tier database architecture that has been in place for the past 25 years will be unsustainable in future, says , regional director at Oracle Africa.

De Menezes told the Oracle CXO Executive Forum in Sandton recently that the model based on separate server, networking and storage layers could not meet the changing needs of enterprises.

“The rate of business and technology change has increased dramatically. Data volumes will have grown by over 50 times by 2020, what is the market leader today is a loss leader tomorrow. Businesses that fail to innovate fall behind. Yet enterprises need to keep innovating off the same cost base, amid challenges such as rising costs of power and labour and a variable exchange rate,” he said.

“We challenge three-tier architecture as one that will not be sustainable going forward,” he said. Enterprises need to move toward the engineered data centre to increase their storage footprint, manage and interrogate an uncontrollable explosion of data, and balance costs, said De Menezes. This change, he noted, is being described as the 3rd Platform for data centres. “Oracle has invested heavily in R&D [research and development] and now owns the IP of every layer from application to disk, collapsing every layer into a single engineered architecture that supports growth and innovation.”

Gary de Menezes, regional director at Oracle AfricaGary de Menezes, regional director at Oracle Africa

With early adopters reporting reductions of up to 30 times their storage footprint, a 20 – 30 times increase in performance and up to 40% reduction in their direct total cost of ownership, engineered architecture clearly supports innovation off a controlled cost base, he said. “It’s time to simplify IT, reduce complexity and improve reliability,” he said.

Steuart Pennington, author and publisher of South Africa - The Good News also spoke and highlighted significant progress made in South Africa in 20 years of democracy. He noted that much of this progress and growth had been driven by the private sector. De Menezes, Nushendran Govender, principal sales consultant pre sales at Oracle; , head of engineered solutions at Application Services, Rudolph Horn, general manager Oracle at Application Services and Beldi, manager: IT Oracle ERP at the National Health Laboratory Services hosted a panel discussion focusing on practical strategies around engineered systems.