SOLUTION OVERVIEW

VIRTUALIZING YOUR ORACLE DATABASE WITH EMC VSPEX AND XTREMIO Unleashing Agility and Performance for Oracle Databases with the Performance of All-Flash Storage

THE CHALLENGE: PERFORMANCE AND SCALABILITY IN A DIGITAL WORLD Today’s business applications can manage more data and provide greater value than ever before, but they also require more consistent I/O performance and hardware scalability to make this possible. This is forcing IT departments to re-think the way they deploy hardware and, especially when it comes to transactional workloads that require fast response times.

Many businesses running Oracle databases for their transactional workloads are looking to evolve their infrastructure to provide greater application performance, reliability, and scalability.

Deploying an Oracle virtualization solution with EMC’s XtremIO all-flash array as part of a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure can help you realize the benefits of new technology faster, while also helping to eliminate much of the risk associated with new deployments. Every VSPEX solution is thoroughly tested and documented by EMC, and packaged and delivered by one of over 1,800 certified IT resellers.

THE SOLUTION: VSPEX WITH XTREMIO FOR ORACLE DATABASES EMC VSPEX with XtremIO for Oracle Databases provides a pre-tested and proven infrastructure that simplifies and accelerate deployments for database administrators and IT infrastructure teams. VSPEX allows IT to meet the challenges presented by the most demanding online transaction processing (OLTP), analytics and reporting, and test/development environments by helping you achieve and sustain superior input/output operations per second (IOPS) with minimal latency.

XtremIO was designed from the ground up to unleash the full performance potential of solid-state flash drives. XtremIO-based solutions deliver predictable and consistent performance with sub-millisecond latency while minimizing hardware costs and maximizing product lifespan.

FLASH SCALABILITY OPTIMIZED FOR ORACLE XtremIO storage systems are based on a scale-out architecture that begins with a single building block, called an X-Brick. When additional performance and capacity are required, the system easily scales out by adding additional X-Bricks. Each X-Brick includes storage and two compute nodes, allowing performance to scale linearly. This means that each X-Brick increases the performance of the cluster while latency remains consistently low.

ESSENTIALS Challenges

Databases demand consistent low latency and exceptional I/O performance to respond instantly to OLTP transactions and shrink Business Intelligence batch processing times. Hence, consolidating and virtualizing databases has been considered a risky initiative for any enterprise.

The Solution

VSPEX with XtremIO ensures predictable levels of performance for database environments demanding hundreds of thousands of IOPS and sub-millisecond latency. It helps build agile application lifecycle by consolidating production, test, development, QA and analytics environments on a high performance storage platform economically.

XtremIO also features a free EMC plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) 12c. This plug-in provides DBAs the ability to directly monitor XtremIO array performance metrics & configuration information directly through Oracle Enterprise Manager and simplifies performance trouble-shooting by providing relationship mapping between Oracle databases and XtremIO.

HIGH PERFORMANCE FOR DEMANDING WORKLODS All-Flash Arrays (AFAs) are the best way to improve the response times of high-performance OLTP and decision support applications. But not all AFAs are equal. XtremIO saves storage space (and money) via inline deduplication and compression for data reduction and by allowing for the simplification and consolidation of multiple workloads and environments on the same array.

XtremIO is also the only all-flash array to fully integrate with VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), allowing the system to provide array-based and data reduction enhanced host offloading of common storage tasks (block zeroing, XCOPY, ATS, unmap) for VMware virtual machine provisioning.

DELIVER DATA CENTER AGILITY XtremIO gives your IT staff more flexibility by providing space-efficient copy data services that allow you to test and develop applications without eating up valuable disk space. These full-performance snapshots are metadata and capacity space-efficient and inherently writeable. This means you can copy your database as many times as you need to and even run real time analytics on these copies without adding overhead or using additional storage space.

XtremIO’s flash-specific data protection algorithms ensure the array is as resilient as it is fast. Every X-Brick has its data protected in an N+2 scheme that tolerates multiple, simultaneous SSD failures. Optimal data encoding and decoding processes recover from failed SSDs rapidly with distributed rebuilds. Hot spares are not needed since XtremIO’s distributed rebuilding process utilizes free space in the array.

XtremIO also eliminates the need for planned downtime by providing non-disruptive software and firmware upgrades to ensure 7X24 continuous operations. Furthermore, each X-Brick has hot-pluggable components, which eliminates the downtime normally required to swap out hardware.

SUMMARY VSPEX with XtremIO reference architectures deliver complete virtualized solutions that are simple, efficient, and flexible. As with all VSPEX offerings, rigorous testing and validation eliminates the complexity of planning, sizing, and testing so that you can quickly deploy a complete infrastructure. You can use this infrastructure for production and non-production workloads, and add capacity with linear and predictable expansion with a solution that offers high IOPS and low latency all the time, without compromise. And with VSPEX, support is simple: just call EMC. A specialized VSPEX support team will handle all calls and stays on line until resolution. So you can rest assured knowing your entire VSPEX solution is fully supported by EMC.

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EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.

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