Contributed by Gary Carter
Open source software has been saving organizations money for years in operating systems with Linux, in the middleware layer with tools like JBoss, and virtualization with Xen and other options. These IT organizations embarked on these journeys to open source alternatives to reconfigure IT spending and improve their agility to drive new innovation.
New research from analysts like Gartner and Forrester have verified that many organizations can now extend their savings to the database layer*. Eighty percent (80%) of traditional DBMS deployments are candidates to move to OSS RDBMS and 70% of new applications will use an OSS DBMS by 2018 as well.**
As IT managers embark on their journeys to replace expensive RDBMS' with an open source alternative, Postgres has emerged as the database of choice for a wide range of applications from mission-critical ACID transactional applications to new applications of innovation based on NoSQL techniques and technologies.
Unfortunately, what isn't as obvious as choosing Postgres, is figuring out which path to select when adopting Postgres. Because of its popularity and flexible open source license, there are a number of ways in which an organization can adopt Postgres, each with distinct advantages and disadvantages.
For large enterprises looking to save hundreds of thousands or millions of database dollars, the trick is to deploy as much Postgres as possible. However, to transform core IT and replace large database footprints with Postgres requires a Postgres platform that provides all of the vendor commitment, services, responsiveness and risk reduction available in current enterprise database deployments.
Which adoption path is chosen can have a dramatic impact on the journey to the pot of Postgres gold - some journeys will beat paths quickly through densely forested obstacles to their goals while other paths may leave travelers lost and wandering in the desert.
For over 11 years, EDB has helped guide many large enterprises to significant open source database savings by adopting Postgres and re-directing that money to important new IT projects. Our customers’ experiences with Postgres can be summarized in a handful of adoption paths each with very different risk profiles for the characteristics that matter most to large enterprises when evaluating the adoption of any enterprise software.
Ideally, IT management would have available to them a roadmap showing the travel times and traffic jams at each intersection of each adoption path and the associated risks: technical capabilities, software roadmaps, technical support, time-to-market or deployment, cost, vendor relationships and software control.
Fortunately, just such a roadmap exists in an EDB white paper titled: Which Postgres Is Right for Me? . This white paper includes commentary and easy to read charts that contrast and compare the Pros and Cons of the above enterprise software characteristics and each Postgres adoption path.
So you are no longer on your own to choose your route to Postgres savings. Download the white paper now and get started on your journey to significant savings.
* For more details and references on this trend see Keith Alsheimer's blog titled "Open Source is the New Data Center Standard".
** Gartner, State of Open Source RDBMS, 2015, Donald Feinberg and Merv Adrian, April 21, 2015.