Every September, tens of thousands of IT professionals converge upon San Francisco for one of the largest technology events of the year, Oracle OpenWorld.
Dell Technologies was at the event in full force this year as a partner with Dell PowerMax storage. Here’s a look at what was most important to us at the show.
PowerMax and Oracle, the perfect pair
PowerMax, the world’s fastest data storage array, got faster last week with the addition of end-to-end NVMe, storage class memory (SCM) for persistent storage, and real-time machine learning to optimize Oracle workloads. PowerMax SCM powered by dual port Intel® Optane™ SSDs delivers up to 50% better response times compared with SAS flash (NAND), and is offered in 750GB and 1.5TB drive capacities.
PowerMax features high-speed smarts to power the most critical Oracle workloads. It also directly aligns to Oracle customer requirements for higher levels of performance, hyper consolidation, simplified storage, and real multi-cloud to truly modernize the data center.
This announcement builds on Dell’s already impressive momentum in the high-end market. Dell is the undisputed leader of the high-end storage market according to IDC, with a 43.9% share; nearly triple that of the next highest competitor.[1] PowerMax was also the winner of CRN’s 2018 Product of the Year and Tech Innovator awards.
The latest PowerMax announcements help customers better manage their high-value applications with particular focus on:
- Massive consolidation of multiple concurrent and mixed workloads, especially deployments that require great read response times during heavy write activity
- Latency sensitive applications that require the lowest response times
- Mission-critical real-time analytics apps like fraud detection, real-time marketing analytics
- High demand OLTP systems: trading systems, large scale billing apps
- Large ERP systems and demanding Healthcare deployments (EPIC Cache databases)
In addition, PowerMax automation support for Kubernetes, VMware and Ansible streamlines provisioning, replication and other storage management tasks. Whether building out an on-premises cloud or private data center, the vRO plug-in for PowerMax enables the automation and orchestration of storage provisioning and management tasks for PowerMax storage systems. Out-of-box workflow libraries include both low-level and VMware-integrated workflows to enable customers to use the workflows as is or customize them to meet their automation needs.
But what good is performance if you can’t get to the applications? Like many companies, Dell Technologies runs many of its own applications on Oracle. So integrated features like true “active-active” Oracle stretch clusters for real disaster tolerance, non-distructive migrations, deduplication, compression, and data “snaps” for team application development and testing keep business momentum moving quickly as well.
Dell Technologies and Oracle Cloud
As we saw this week at OOW, VMware is looking to bring new cloud support to Oracle with VMware Cloud Foundation on Oracle Cloud. As part of this announcement, an Oracle Cloud VMware solution will be supported by Oracle and its partners. The solution will be based on VMware Cloud Foundation and will deliver a full-stack software-defined data center (SDDC) including VMware vSphere, NSX, and vSAN.
Dell Technologies Cloud built on VMware Cloud Foundation provides Oracle customers with true hybrid cloud experience in a multi-cloud world, delivering consistent management, operations, flexibility, ease-of-use, and full life cycle management of hardware and software components.
Moving Forward
Organizations of all sizes are striving to achieve a cloud operating model in their IT transformation journey. Multi-cloud environments are a reality. In fact, IDC estimates more than 70% of companies are using multiple cloud environments. Dell Technologies understand that real business moves ahead with an agile infrastructure strategy without leaving existing workloads behind. Now the real work begins. Look to Dell Technologies to explore and bring the latest tested and proven products, solutions, and strategies that enable real transformation from the edge to the data center core to the cloud.
To Learn More
- Join the conversation on Twitter @DellStorage
- Read the IDC report on multi-cloud environments
- Learn all about the latest PowerMax features
[1] IDC WW Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, 2019Q2, September 5, 2019 – Vendor Revenue.