An Architect's vision

• Increase IT responsiveness and efficiency. • Reduce capital expenditures and operational overhead. • Provide greater business flexibility through an on-demand, pay-as-you-go model that scales with your business. • Get more choice in providers — use in-house or third-party vendors. • Free up IT resources for innovation. • Automatic updates • Remote access

The database architecture called shared-disk, which eliminates the need to partition data, is ideal for cloud databases. Shared-disk databases allow clusters of low-cost servers to use a single collection of data, typically served up by a Storage Area Network (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS). All of the data is available to all of the servers, there is no partitioning of the data. As a result, if you are using two servers, and your query takes .5 seconds, you can dynamically add another server and the same query might now take .35 seconds. In other words, shared-disk databases support elastic scalability.

The database architecture called shared-disk, which eliminates the need to partition data, is ideal for cloud databases. Shared-disk databases allow clusters of low-cost servers to use a single collection of data, typically served up by a Storage Area Network (SAN) or Network Attached Storage (NAS). All of the data is available to all of the servers, there is no partitioning of the data.