White Papers

The Hardware Perspective

Datacenters are an aggregate of very heterogeneous elements interacting with each other and incurring a complex chain of dependencies, particularly around the point of contact between hardware and software. Against this backdrop, IDC is observing a great push from suppliers and end users alike toward a consumption model based on pre-integrated blocks of optimized hardware and software that IT departments need only to fine-tune, as opposed to build out of a collection of different components. This approach was the one chosen in 2010 by BNP Paribas, one of the largest financial institutions in the world, in order to upgrade its datawarehouse by implementing Oracle Exadata Database Machine as the backend for all the applications, allowing financial analysts to pull data for their daily trading activities.