Being in Alliances is an exhilarating job. As the facilitator between two large, global technology companies I have the great privilege of connecting the dots between our respective corporate strategies in order to create value for our customers.
So where do we start? We begin by listening to our customers and identifying opportunities where we deepen integrations to help improve performance and efficiencies. We conducted a recent survey with the IOUG that uncovered the top challenges facing Oracle DBAs today. One interesting finding was that 80% of IT organizations identified collaboration between DBAs and storage administrators as key to the productivity of the organization. This sounds like something EMC and Oracle are well positioned to address.
We began by looking at Oracle Database 12c which includes literally dozens of new features to help database customers improve efficiency, performance, and availability. Working together, EMC and Oracle engineering focused on some exciting new areas of integration to help provide DBAs more speed in provisioning Oracle databases and spend less time dealing with data corruption. Time to deployment of new databases and keeping those databases online and productive are both equally critical to DBAs.
EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) for Oracle VM is a plug-in that enables Oracle VM (OVM) to discover and provision EMC VMAX & VNX storage arrays using the Oracle Storage Connect (OSC) framework. The framework provides a set of storage discovery and provisioning Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow DBAs to manage and provision storage devices in an Oracle VM environment.
Oracle and EMC have also collaborated on an engineering project to support Oracle Database 12c’s new Multitenant architecture. This enables pluggable databases to be created, destroyed and managed using underlying storage snapshot capabilities of VNX. A DBA may rapidly create space-efficient clones of large databases and the snapshots can be created within minutes vs. hours or days.
Sumanta Chatterjee, Vice President at Oracle, was instrumental in driving this integration with EMC and outlines the value to Oracle customers as follows: “Oracle and EMC have collaborated on an Engineering project that supports the new Multitenant architecture of Oracle Database 12c. The underlying storage snapshot capabilities of VNX are leveraged to support provisioning of snapshot clones of pluggable databases, which may be created, destroyed and managed. The initial deployment supports Oracle Linux release 6.4 with support for NAS on VNX-File (NAS 7.0.53). Use cases include rapid provisioning of pluggable databases for test, development or QA purposes, as well as provisioning of analytical sandboxes as snapshots of data marts and data warehouses. This technology creates rapid and space efficient clones of large databases and the snapshots can be created within minutes vs. hours or days.
Data loss and data corruption can be catastrophic, but a new standards-based, end-to-end data integrity solution—which is the result of a joint effort by EMC, Emulex, and Oracle—mitigates episodes of silent data corruption by supporting the T10 Protection Information (T10 PI) standard. The T10 PI standard provides for end-to-end advanced data integrity for VMAX.
This is just a sampling of how we’re addressing the challenges IT orgs are facing today. Stay tuned for even more collaboration between EMC and Oracle to help DBAs and storage admins live in harmony.