<p>SAN FRANCISCO -- The listprice for a full Exalogic Elastic Cloud rack is $1,075,000 plus an additional $129,000 forpremier support. Then there are charges for customer data and retention, software licenses,software updates and licensed support. That's a lot of money for an application server,supercharged as it may be. Yet, a handful of executives explained how they made the Exalogicbusiness case hereat OpenWorld this week.</p><p>Nathaniel Lantz, systems manager at Allegis Group Inc., a Hanover, Md.-based global staffingcompany, explained that his firm is in the midst of a data center modernization initiative. Part ofthat project meant moving the company's mission-critical applications to a convergedinfrastructure. With 300 offices around the world and the hefty task of managing HR and payroll,the PeopleSoft system is the definition of a mission-critical application at Allegis. The companyprocesses about 133,000 paychecks per week, every week of the year.</p><p>The company ran through a proof of concept with four different converged architectures beforedeciding upon Exadata and Exalogic. Performance is often one of the primary use cases for Exalogic,according to Mohamad Afshar, vice president at Oracle.</p><p>"High availability is key to our business," Lantz agreed. "Mission-critical payroll processesrequire uptime."</p><p><a href="http://searchoracle.techtarget.com/feature/Oracle-customers-build-the-Exalogic-business-case">Keep reading...</a></p>