Datrium Becoming Oracle Gold Partner

Datrium, Inc. announced it has been named an Oracle Gold Partner.

Key components of Oracle environment
including production and dev/test

The company also announced qualification of Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on the firm’s DVX, extending the administrative simplicity,  availability and integrated backup benefits of its open convergence approach to customer’s Oracle International Corporation‘s RAC deployments.

As IT organizations seek alternatives to expensive and inflexible array infrastructure for mission critical RAC deployments, they encounter three main challenges with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). When organizations need to roll out a small two-node RAC deployment, HCI cannot offer a two-node cluster. In order to provide the highest level of availability, the minimum cluster size for HCI is five-nodes, which is subject to more than twice the Oracle licensing costs. There is also an availability mismatch between HCI and RAC. For example, RAC’s built-in availability architecture ensures that a four-node RAC deployment will continue to run even if three of the four nodes fail; whereas with HCI, should more than two nodes fail, the entire cluster fails. Finally, many HCI systems do not have the built-in copy data management to clone production databases for test/dev purposes with zero performance impact.

Simplifying RAC deployments
That’s all changing with Datrium’s announced support for virtualizing RAC on its open convergence platform, DVX. This breed of converged infrastructure combines compute, flash-based primary storage, and integrated backup – now with support for RAC. With the company’ solution, customers can deploy mixed production application workloads and test/development workloads in one platform while maintaining isolation for optimal service levels. This approach to convergence addresses issues with RAC on HCI and gives customers a more compatible server-powered option for their deployments.

“At Neovera, Inc. we have built our reputation on addressing the unique needs of our customers with unmatched customer service. We were looking to move off our legacy array infrastructure to a modern convergence solution for our Oracle RAC infrastructure that combined VM-level administration with robust availability and bare-metal performance,” said Scott Weinberg, CEO and founder. “With Datrium, we got that and more, including end-to-end data security and an integrated backup platform which saves us a ton of time and money.“

With the company’s support of Oracle RAC, scaling is configuration-free. Data services such as erasure coding, global deduplication and compression are always-on and there is no need to selectively configure performance versus efficiency for a given workload-with Datrium you get both. Adding another RAC node is as simple as cloning a VM in VMware vCenter. And performance remains with automatic alignment of I/O with the most active RAC node and VMware host, eliminating network reads and maintaining high performance.

Availability, data integrity and security
With DVX, servers remain stateless so where there are N servers, N-1 servers can fail and the DVX remains available. This is well-matched with RAC which is architected with the same availability model.

In addition to HA, DVX provides end-to-end data integrity checking for RAC, meaning the data written to the RAC node will always match the data written to both flash and secondary storage. Finally, DVX provides end-to-end data security by encrypting RAC data on host, in-flight across the network, and at rest on the DVX Data Node.

DVX also provides RAC customers with real-time VM analytics, providing instant insights at the database VM level, improving visibility, saving time and speeding results.

Integrated data management for RAC
DVX provides near instant recovery for RAC by providing consistent local and remote snapshot backups of RAC VMs across all VMware hosts, complimenting Oracle RMAN and Data Guard. Backups are cost effectively maintained on the firm’s data nodes, which store both hot and cold data in compressed and globally deduplicated form on secondary storage. Backups can also be archived to Amazon Web Services and managed from a single pane of glass within the DVX console.

In addition to integrated backup, Datrium also accelerates development cycles for RAC developers with copy data management functionality. Cloned copies of production databases are available to software developers or QA engineers, speeding design, development and testing.

“While HCI clusters are replacing some types of arrays, they are not a good match for the gold standard in enterprise data availability, Oracle RAC,” said Brian Biles, founder and CEO, Datrium. “Datrium’s open convergence approach was designed for scalable host isolation and efficient cloud data management, so RAC is a great fit, and we’re thrilled to be named an Oracle Gold Partner.“

Oracle Gold Partner status
The company has been awarded Oracle Gold Partner status, gaining access to partner training, development and demonstration licenses, and other technical resources. With its status, Datrium and Oracle can now collaborate effectively to provide joint customers with solution experience.

Availability
Oracle RAC support is provided at no charge in the next DVX software release, available next quarter.
Single instance Oracle is available on DVX.

Resources:
Oracle solution page    
Oracle solution brief