Oracle Private Cloud Appliance (PCA) – when and why?

What has become so critical in today's competitive business is the ability to fulfill the sudden and unpredictable demands that arises. It requires data centers agility, rapid deployments and cloud ready solutions. To succeed in today's modern business, companies must be ready to deploy innovative applications and quickly adopt the changes in the market.

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance (PCA) is an integrated, 'wire once' converged system designed for fast cloud and rapid application deployments at the data centers. PCA is a one stop system for all your applications, where mixed operating systems (Linux, Solaris, RHEL and Windows) workloads can be consolidated into a single machine.

Its has been observed off-late here in GCC specially, more and more organization are moving towards the PCA adoption. Hence, I thought of just writing a blog explaining the prime features and functionalities of PCA.  Once I get some hands-on (which is in the very near future), I would love to write some advance concepts about of PCA and how really organization benefited with PCA.

Here are the key features of PCA:

• Engineered system comes with fully prebuilt and preconfigured setup
• Cost effective solution for most of the Oracle and non-Oracle workloads
• Automated installation and configuration software controller
• Prebuilt OVM to speed-up the Oracle deployments
• Single-button DR solutions through OEM
• Pay for only you use policy
• Flexibility to Oracle storage or any pre-existing storage
• PCA certifies all Oracle software that is certified to run on OVM  
• Deployment of PCA at the data center is very straightforward and simple. The system will be ready within minutes/
• You can add virtual machines (OVM) either with some basic configuration or use the standard OVM templates
• No additional software licenses are required on PCA
• Greatly reduces the time required for deployments. A new deployment can be achieved in hours rather than days in contrast to the traditional infrastructure
• Easy integration into to existing data center models
• OVM included with no additional cost

A pair of management servers are installed in a active/standard  for HA. The master management node runs the full set of services, whereas the standby node runs only a subset of services.

The compute nodes (Oracle Servers X series) constitutes the virtual platforms and provides the processing power and memory capacity for the servers they hosted. The entire functionality is orchestrated by the management node (master). 

References:
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers/private-cloud-appliance/oracle-private-cloud-appliance-ds-2595915.pdf
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers/private-cloud-appliance/oracle-private-cloud-appliance-faq-2595945.pdf
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/engineered-systems/coalfire-oracle-pca-pci-dss-3671919.pdf
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E71897_01/
 

Stay tuned for more updates on this.