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New Oracle Database Services Launched for 11g Upgrade

May 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Mentora is now offering database performance testing and tuning service to ensure database performance during Oracle database software upgrades or server/storage upgrades. Mentora will offer database analysis and tuning by expert enterprise-class DBA using Oracle’s premier database testing tool, Real Application Testing (RAT), as a fully-outsourced service.

“Now that Oracle only provides limited support for 9i and 10g, customers who haven’t upgraded to 11g are under a lot of pressure,” said Kathryn Saunders, President & COO. “We have seen firsthand how risky this upgrade can be. Good testing is critical – but it’s expensive if you have to buy and learn the Oracle testing tools yourself.”

Launched in 2009, Oracle 11g is replacing Oracle 9i and 10g databases, for which only limited support (and no net-new fixes) are now available. 

“Databases that haven’t been upgraded to 11g yet are most likely complex and high-risk or managed by teams with limited resources. Our sophisticated turnkey performance assurance service replays 9i & 10g production applications on an upgraded 11g database, compares metrics and tunes in 11g, vastly reducing upgrade risk,” said Andrey Dmitriev, Director of Hosting Operations for Mentora. 

Mentora’s new testing service is an enhancement to its current database upgrade and functional testing services. Database upgrades, functional/regression testing and the newly announced performance assurance with RAT are available as a comprehensive Oracle database upgrade package or as individual services.

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Your Brand in the Social Media Age

May 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Loved this set of info graphics created by AskYourTargetMarket.com regarding the impact that social media platforms are having on our brands. Their recent survey of 2,000 US Internet users drives home the fact that momentary hiccups in customers’ perceptions of us cost us days of negative buzz and dollars on the bottom line. Social media “circles” represent clusters of your target market that are connected through personal connections. So if birds of a feather flock together, then if one of our clients tweets or posts a negative comment, you can bet that his or her online friends are either customers or prospects.

One bad post or tweet has a multiplicative effect. The numbers are astounding.

  • 85% have a Facebook account and 49% have a Twitter account
  • 74% use Facebook daily and 35% tweet daily
  • 57% have more than 100 friends on Facebook; 11% have more than 500 friends
  • 29% of Facebook users follow a brand and 58% of users have “liked” a brand

Of Facebook users, 42% have mentioned a brand by name in a status update and 41% have shared a link, video or story about a brand. Twitter users are similar. 39% have tweeted about a brand and 29% have re-tweeted about a brand. What does this mean? Every minute of poor performance that your customers and prospects experience with your website cost you in posts, tweets and dollars. Make sure you test every time you re-platform, add new lines of business, add more widgets to your site (even those Facebook like buttons cost your site time when loading), or before a major traffic spike. And make sure your application hosting provider gives you end user Service Level Agreements that keep your customers happy. Now that’s something to “like.”

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More Smartphones than Humans?

May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We’ve said it before; smartphones are dramatically changing our industry.  According the Mashable.com, they are gobbling up network capacity and are raising the stakes for online applications in terms of availability and performance on mobile devices.  But did you know that by the end of this year, there could be more smartphones on the planet than humans, and by 2016 there could be 10 billion smartphones? That’s 1.4 mobile devices per capita.   That’s a lot of shopping, browsing, streaming and sharing.  Your website has got to be in tip top shape.  Click here to learn more about getting your mobile site optimized for performance and speed.

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The Growth of Hybrid Cloud Computing

April 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It’s interesting to see the market’s increasing support for Mentora’s approach to the cloud; hybrid cloud computing offers the best of both worlds.   A recent CloudTweaks article reports that online gaming company Zynga, which has millions of subscribers for its games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, has decided to move 80% of their public cloud usage to specialized private cloud services.    The company’s CTO says they won’t make a move to all private cloud because he wants to be able to launch new games in the private cloud and use the public cloud to handle bursting traffic demands.   He explains, “We rent the spike.  We love knowing that shock absorber is there.”

We like this approach and agree that a hybrid cloud infrastructure makes abundant sense for SMBs and online startups that don’t have a reliable demand forecast.   We are increasingly working with companies that want to host their “base” in our private cloud and utilize the public cloud for the burst where we’re planning and managing the entire hybrid environment.

What do you think?  Is hybrid cloud in your plans?  We’d love to hear from you.

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Private Cloud “Tipping Point”?

April 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A recent video blog from Mary E. Shacklett contends that Private Cloud has reached a “tipping point”. Enterprises and even SMBs are now expressing a clear preference for Private Cloud over Public Cloud.

Mentora experts agree.  Thanks primarily to concerns over Public Cloud performance and security, Private Cloud is seeing a lot of action. Our customers who depend on their Web applications to generate revenue have overwhelmingly “voted with their feet” in the last two years to support Mary’s conclusion. The result: their migration from “dedicated” servers to Private Cloud. So far, Public Cloud is a minor player, used for some of these companies’ non-production test and staging sites.

Looking ahead, the most widely preferred method of deployment will likely be Hybrid Cloud: Private Cloud (for control and security) combined with Public Cloud (for scalability and to meet temporary demands) with – if necessary – limited use of dedicated servers (for point purposes such as I/O intensive clustered databases).

Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems as quoted on gigaom.com (http://gigaom.com/cloud/forget-public-private-clouds-the-future-is-hybrids/), illustrated the hybrid approach by commenting on Plinga, a Berlin, Germany, publisher of social games. “Plinga initially offers their games on Amazon Web Servers to provide nearly unlimited scale that a data center can’t match. Once traffic settles down and becomes more predictable, Plinga seamlessly moves the traffic to their internal cloud of servers.”

What do you think about where Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud are going?  Post a comment to let us know.

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