Every administrator knows that the most effective way to get to grips with new technology is to sit down with the software to practice, experiment and explore. Building and experimenting with new Oracle software is something we have been doing for a long time and the concept of small architectures is to allow administrators to familiarise themselves a new system on hardware which mirrors a large production system without huge costs. Essentially a small architecture is the smallest possible hardware combination required to run the system. These systems are physically small enough to sit on your desk and quiet enough to run in a normal office environment.

To make the learning experience as realistic and useful as possible we keep the systems as 'real' as we can without introducing excessive cost and taking up valuable desk space. This is achieved by using low-cost mini-ITX hardware and commodity networking equipment to model much larger Oracle system within a small footprint. All systems run Oracle Enterprise Linux so that, for administrators running any type of Unix, tasks such as scripting, maintenance and management are kept as close to the product environment as possible. The end result is that the administrator has a system which is: small, fast, reliable and realistic at an affordable price.

If you are interested in the possibilites of small architectures please get in touch, we no longer list prices for individual systems as the prices of the components can change over time and the prices quickly become out of date.

Recent build projects include a single node Oracle 11g Database server and a two node Oracle e-Business Suite R12 system. These systems represent only a small proportion of what is possible in a small architecture, systems can be built to include: DataGuard, RAC, Secure Backup and 10g Application Server.

If you have comments or ideas we would very much like to hear from you at:
enquiries@jamesballconsulting.com