In today's hyper-competitive environment, companies are looking to manage corporate performance. Matching strategic goals with key business objectives requires the ability to analyze cross departmental data in data warehouses and other repositories to get the right information to the right people at the right time. While many organizations use business intelligence (BI) software to gain some strategic insight, they also want to track customer behavior and internal and external business trends in order to perform better on a daily basis. With enterprises conducting business on a global scale, keeping these critical BI solutions up and running around the clock is essential to success.

This Sun BluePrints™ article describes an enterprise deployment architecture for Oracle™ Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition using Sun servers running the Solaris™ Operating System and Sun™ Storage 7000 Unified Storage systems. Designed to empower employees in organizations in any industry—from customer service, shipping, and finance to manufacturing, human resources, and more—to become potential decision makers, the architecture brings fault tolerance, security, resiliency, and performance to enterprise deployments. Taking advantage of key virtualization technologies, the architecture can be used to consolidate multiple tiers onto a single system to help reduce cost and complexity. A short discussion of the performance characteristics of the architecture using a realistic workload also is included.