EMC Symmetrix With SSD for Oracle

EMC Corporation announced a solution that incorporates EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 storage systems using enterprise flash drive (EFD) technology with Oracle Database Applications to significantly improve application performance. This new solution is the first of its kind to offer the applied use of EFDs for specific Oracle application environments. Because EFDs store data using flash memory, they can provide response times that are an order of magnitude faster than the fastest traditional hard disk drives, are a cost-effective alternative to using expensive SDRAM-based EFDs or I/O accelerators, and are ideal for Oracle application environments with high transaction rates.

"Flash-based storage technology is ideal for Oracle Database 11g and Oracle RAC 11g application environments that require the fastest retrieval and storing of data," said EMC’s Barbara Robidoux, Vice President, Storage Product Marketing. "EMC has invested engineering resources to analyze and document the use cases and provide best practice recommendations to reap the maximum return on investment. Our customers can now enjoy performance gains, consolidation in terms of the number of disks required and dramatic cost savings through reduced power consumption."

As Oracle databases continue to grow and handle ever-increasing workloads, customers are looking for innovative infrastructure components that are cost-effective and maintain the highest performance levels. By integrating the ultra high performance capabilities of flash technology, Oracle environments can use a single EFD to achieve performance that would have previously required dozens of traditional Fibre Channel drives, including:

• Quantum Leap in Performance: Symmetrix DMX-4 with flash drives delivers sub-millisecond application response time and up to 30 times more I/O operations per second (IOPS) than the fastest available disk drives.
• Consolidation and Energy Efficiency: Because of performance benefits, a single flash drive can replace or consolidate many Fibre Channel drives. Additionally because flash drives do not contain mechanical components, they consume significantly less energy per I/O operation than traditional disk drives.
• Enhanced Information Lifecycle Management: The addition of flash drives adds a new Tier 0 level of high performance infrastructure for Oracle environments. Flash drives can easily be integrated into an overall Oracle Information Lifecycle Management strategy to tier data based on performance, scalability and service level requirements.