EMC Accelerates Virtualization of Oracle on VMware Platform

Highlights of New EMC Proven Solutions:

• Accelerates the movement of Oracle production databases from physical to virtual in less than 30 minutes without downtime on EMC Symmetrix VMAX and EMC VNX unified storage.
• Accelerates the scaling of virtualized production system with the ability to deploy four new production application and database servers in approximately 10 minutes with VMware VM templates on EMC Symmetrix VMAX and EMC VNX unified storage enabling zero downtime.
• Improves performance of Oracle database and reduces costs through leveraging EMC Symmetrix VMAX and FAST VP with VMware vSphere.
• New EMC reference architecture using Vblock Infrastructure Platforms for a significantly-virtualized Oracle application environment improves IT application performance more than 300% as compared to legacy SUN/Solaris infrastructure.
• Enhanced backup and recovery of Oracle with EMC Data Domain data deduplication storage systems allow databases administrators to control Oracle backups using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to send data directly to systems that provide 10-30x data reduction.
• Enhanced replication of Oracle with  VNX unified storage and the EMC Remote Protection Suite enable transaction replication for point-in-time copies of Oracle Database 11g environments without downtime or performance impact to production applications.
• New EMC Application Virtualization Readiness Assessment for Oracle helps companies develop a virtualization strategy, system design and implementation plan for a virtual Oracle system by evaluating constraints and dependencies across Oracle applications and infrastructure to.

EMC Corporation announces several new Proven Solutions and real-world use cases from EMC’s IT organization to help customers accelerate their journey to the cloud and virtualize their mission critical Oracle test and development servers, production databases, as well as applications. By using EMC and VMware vSphere as the cloud infrastructure to virtualize Oracle environments, customers can achieve benefits in performance, TCO and efficiency through self adjusting tiered storage, faster replication and high availability.

Virtualizing all levels of the Oracle ecosystem requires an infrastructure with virtual servers and storage to unlock the benefits of Oracle software. EMC maps out a logical approach to deploying VMware vSphere across Oracle test and development servers, production database servers as well as application servers to achieve the following results:

• Deploy Oracle test and development in seconds: Consolidating infrastructure across shared Symmetrix VMAX and VNX unified storage systems reduces the time to provision new servers and storage capacity, while EMC replication products allow movement of production Oracle databases to virtualized test and development in less than 30 minutes with zero application impact. Once virtualized, VMware vSphere-based VM templates can be utilized together with Oracle’s Clone DB feature to deploy new test/dev environments in seconds accelerating the speed and efficiency of test and development for Oracle database and application environments.
• Scale Oracle production databases and applications in minutes: Symmetrix VMAX and VNX unified storage consolidate application servers across a shared network, allowing common data for every application server to be shared avoiding redundancy and excessive cost. Once virtualized, four new production database and application servers can be deployed in approximately 10 minutes using VMware VM templates, allowing applications to scale without downtime.
• Improve performance and reduce cost through automated tiering: Customers are increasingly exploiting the benefits of automated tiering with SSDs. In fact, EMC shipped more flash capacity in the first half of 2011 than in all of 2010 on VMAX and EMC unified storage (VNX, CLARiiON, Celerra and Centera). Technology such as FAST VP for instance reduces the time it takes to configure and tune storage for Oracle environments by up to 80%. Deploying Symmetrix VMAX and FAST VP with VMware vSphere in Oracle database server environments out-performs a physical Oracle database server environment delivering up to 44% more transactions per minute and up to 50% more users with up to 33% savings on power and cooling, using up to 40% less CPU cores through virtualization. Leveraging FAST VP in physical Oracle environments delivered over 80% more TPM with up to 37% faster response times. EMC’s IT organization has documented how leveraging Vblock infrastructure platforms from VCE, the Virtual Computing Environment Company, boosted performance more than 300% for EMC production IT applications running on a significantly-virtualized Oracle infrastructure, while in one year saving over $5M in hardware, software and maintenance as compared to the legacy SUN/Solaris environment.
• Enhanced Oracle backup and recovery: Database administrators can backup and recover Oracle databases directly to and from Data Domain systems using Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN). Oracle backups can be reduced in size by 10-30 times so disk backup storage is cost-effective for onsite retention and efficient for network-based replication to disaster recovery sites. Data Domain systems are qualified with all enterprise backup software applications including EMC Avamar and EMC Networker.
• Enhanced Oracle replication: VNX Unified storage deployed with the Remote Protection Suite improves replication of Oracle Database 11g environments by maintaining write order consistency while avoiding the need to shut down the database or put it in hot backup mode during replication. Consistent writes represent no impact to database performance and normal I/O resumes once the replication is complete.
• Create the optimal virtualization approach for Oracle Applications: EMC Application Virtualization Readiness Assessment for Oracle evaluates the constraints and dependencies across Oracle applications and infrastructure, providing the information necessary to scope and plan a virtualized Oracle environment. EMC Global Services professionals provides consulting and implementation expertise using automated tools and best practices and work directly with customers’ IT and business teams to realize the hardware savings, productivity benefits, and performance increase of a virtual Oracle environment.

"Customers on the path to the cloud require a proven, low-risk means for virtualizing the business-critical applications their businesses depend on, such as Oracle databases," said Hatem Naguib, vice president, alliances, VMware. "VMware and EMC today provide supported, customer-validated solutions for virtualizing Oracle environments that deliver increased performance and agility, accelerated deployment and guaranteed service levels while enabling a pragmatic approach for cloud deployments in the future."

"Many customers have reached the part in their journey to the cloud where the next step is to virtualize their mission critical applications to gain even more OpEx and CapEx savings as well as greater IT efficiency on all levels. With new EMC Proven solutions and reference architectures, EMC is making virtualization of Oracle a cost-effective reality by enabling them to maximize existing Oracle software investments and create a foundation to optimize the use of the VMware platform across their Oracle landscape," said EMC’s Prasad Rampalli, Senior Vice President, EMC Solutions Group.

"In a physical server model, cloning our production Oracle database configuration for test and development was time consuming, complex and expensive, leading to an inappropriate environment that was unacceptable. Virtualizing our Oracle database servers with VMware vSphere on EMC VMAX and EMC VNX storage system allows us to quickly create as many test and development environments as we need using the same virtual infrastructure in just minutes. In addition, virtualizing our Oracle servers has allowed us to leverage more Oracle instances per physical core with the possibility to run different OS and Oracle software versions on the same host, improving the return on investment in our Oracle software," said Andrei Maier, System Architect of Swedbank.

"Through virtualization of our mission-critical application environments, including Oracle, we have been able to consolidate from fifty physical servers to four VMware vSphere servers, a nearly fifteen to one consolidation.  I can now deploy an Oracle test database in under an hour and have it ready to test the latest release of our banking application. Through the use of EMC DataDomain, we have achieved a de-dupe ratio of 20:1 during backups allowing us to scale our virtual environment cost effectively," said Mark A. Smithey, Vice President, technology services at The Washington Trust Company.

"Before virtualizing, utilization rates were typically in the range of 15-20% for our Oracle database servers.  Since deploying VMware vSphere on EMC Symmetrix VMAX storage platform we have almost doubled our server utilization rates through leveraging more Oracle instances on the same infrastructure, increasing our return on investment. In addition, migrating our Oracle database servers to the VMware platform and Linux has led to increased database performance and we can now leverage the functionality of VMware vSphere for faster server failover and high availability," said, Haim Inger, Chief Technology Officer, CLAL.