The OAUG Hyperion SIG Meeting
Conferences like Collaborate are natural places for the Special Interest Groups (SIGS) to hold meetings, as members are normally spread across geographical regions. Sunday evening, the OAUG Hyperion SIG met. It was kicked off by the current president, Ed Delise, who talked a bit about the accomplishments of the SIG over the last year. The SIG has made some great progress and has matured quite a bit, although there is much more to do. Luckily, we have a great team of energized and motivated board members that continue to make the Hyperion SIG the true “Home for Hyperion”. Now more than ever – it is a great time to join. Web Membership is free.
The Major Take-aways….
- Ed Delise is stepping down as President. I strongly encourage customers who want to make a difference in the Hyperion Community to consider running for a board position. Nominations close on May 6th.
- The Marketing and Communications Coordinator, Kristen Newman, announced that the OAUG has been in talks with Oracle to perhaps conduct a Hyperion EPM and BI only conference to give the BI Community their own conference. (Sound familiar? Solutions revisited?) They were originally looking at possibly November for this, but I think the general consensus is that is a bit too aggressive. I would bet that if this indeed comes to fruition, it will be more around Q1 2010. Stay tuned.
- Ed Delise was given an appreciation award for his work on the SIG for the last two years. Congratulations to him.
- Michael Schrader gave a 30 minute presentation on EPM in Trouble Times. However, this seemed to be about the same content that was presented by John Kopcke a bit later.
Each domain lead gave a 5 minute domain update…. I will go over my updates as the Member Services Coordinator and Domain Lead for Infrastructure…
Member Services Coordinator Update
The Member Services update was covered by Ed, however here are the main take-aways…
1. The Hyperion SIG has created a new LinkedIn group which will be used for the official forum. It is free to use for customers.
LinkedIn Group: OAUG – Hyperion SIG
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1834504
This group is intended for an open and free discussion as the home for Hyperion. Job postings will be rejected. Please join! It’s a great place to keep up with what is going on and a resource you can use to ask questions, seek assistance, and bounce ideas off of the user community.
2. Establishing a back-channel into Oracle. I am working very closely with Regina Robuck, Manager, Affiliate Communities with OAUG and Mark Conway, Director, Alliance for Performance Leadership at Oracle to establish a special channel to Oracle on behalf of the Hyperion SIG. This channel can be used to communicate major issues, enhancement requests, bugs, etc to Oracle ad get solid feedback from them. The channel can also be used for Oracle to provide important news and roadmap information back to the community. Stay tuned for more information on that.
Infrastructure Domain Update
Version 11 is the most aggressive Enterprise-class EPM System that Oracle has ever produced. Oracle has done a great job integrating the capabilities of the Hyperion Suite with the robustness of Oracle methodology. Companies are now using Oracle EPM Solutions in global, mission critical capacities. As such, the importance of a sound infrastructure is on the forefront of IT manager’s minds to ensure information delivery service levels. More and more companies are rolling out Oracle EPM solutions in highly available fashions using clustering, 24-hour helpdesk monitoring, and follow-the-sun operations. Knowledge transfer and training of IT staff in the areas of monitoring, tuning, troubleshooting, backup/recovery, and scalability are the keys to successful implementations.
Current Trends in Hyperion Infrastructure
- More customers are moving to version 11, but many waiting
- Those that stay on 9.3 opt to install all the latest and greatest patches – worth it!
- More multiple tier requests (ie DEV and TEST)
- More interest in additional 3rd party support packages to supplement Oracle Support
- Generally more involvement of IT department, mission critical
- IT more involved in creating a proper path-to-production migration and change management policy/procedures
- More attention to backup/recovery and disaster/recovery testing
Hot Topics in Infrastructure – Customized IT Training
- Strive for an autonomous IT departmentDaily maintenance/system administration
- Data flows, communities ports, security
- Starting/stopping
- Location of logs/troubleshooting
- Backup/recovery
- Monitoring, scaling
- Migration
Hot Topics in Infrastructure – Business Continuance
- Minimize downtime in crashes/disasters
- Make use of Clustering technologies
- Oracle Cluster Server (only in V11)
- Load balancing
- Web Services\Distribute load
- maintenance with availability
- Redundant Disk systems
- SANS, mirrors, snapshots
- Staging for scalability
- DNS and virtual IPs
- Version 11 Essbase archiving logs
- Point in time recovery (finally)
The I.T. Side 