Customized Profiles for Oracle Database by Pillar

Pillar Data Systems announced availability of its customized profiles for Oracle database environments and applications, including the storage industry’s tightest integration with Oracle(R) 10g and 11g databases, Oracle VMs and the Oracle Unbreakable Linux program. These new Oracle application profiles in the Axiom storage system allow users to benefit from better performance, increased system availability and uptime, and the ability to centrally manage storage within Oracle environments.

"Users demand best practices to manage and utilize storage to reduce implementation time and cost, simplify upgrades and minimize downtime in their Oracle environments," said Bob Maness, vice president of marketing, Pillar Data Systems. "Continuing Pillar’s long-standing leadership in delivering unique storage services for Oracle databases and applications, users gain the highest storage efficiency and utilization without having to sacrifice performance, guaranteed."

As a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork, Pillar continues to keep current with Oracle certifications to help ensure that joint Pillar and Oracle customers upgrading to the newest Oracle 10g or 11g databases will be able to confidently take advantage of the powerful self-management enhancements, while still seamlessly leveraging the Pillar Axiom storage system for industry-leading utilization, performance, and per-system availability rates.

Pillar also introduced several new Validated Configurations as part of the Oracle Unbreakable Linux program to provide enhanced security, data protection and connectivity solutions to the Linux developer and user communities. Additionally, Pillar’s support of Oracle VM allows improved storage resource utilization, a highly available architecture and enhanced interoperability with Oracle Real Application Clusters. The powerful combination helps customers drive maximum storage efficiency in Oracle and non-Oracle virtualized environments.

With these new Oracle application profiles embedded in the Pillar Axiom platform, the Axiom storage system becomes the only storage system in the industry to offer the following benefits:

• Higher Performance for Oracle Database Partitioning – As an industry first, the Pillar Axiom partitions Oracle databases, enabling users to slice stored data segments for easier management and improved performance. Leveraging Pillar’s Quality of Service (QoS), Oracle can cleanly carve up its databases, prioritizing records in different categories based on age. Pillar uses its flexible platform to categorize and store these records in one storage architecture, gaining better performance for current content and maximizing efficiency for older information.
• More Capacity with Wide Striping – Pillar is able to write 1MB data stripes – the preferred widths for Oracle applications – across multiple spindles for improved performance. This is the largest striping available in the industry, resulting in higher throughput between Pillar storage and requesting applications running in Oracle environments. No other storage system on the market today offers this functionality for Oracle databases and applications.
• Accelerated Recovery Through Pooled RAID 10 – With the ability to spread a LUN across multiple RAID controllers, the Pillar Axiom’s implementation of distributed RAID 10 delivers industry-leading performance for Oracle applications that need higher write throughput performance. Customers can expect as much as 50-percent improvement in write throughput traffic compared to RAID 5 configurations.
• Ease of Use for Modular Scalability – The Pillar Axiom hardware architecture is based on a modular approach that provides redundancy and linear scaling of capacity and performance. Pillar’s high availability and redundancy exist at all levels of the storage system to provide the reliability and availability required by Oracle databases.
• Highest Utilization Rates, Guaranteed – The Pillar Axiom guarantees 80-percent disk utilization, the highest in the industry and double the industry average for Oracle environments.

Since 2001, Pillar and Oracle have been working closely together to ensure that DBAs and storage administrators alike can benefit from seamless integration and ease-of-use to achieve better performance and utilization. Pillar also partners with Oracle to provide the RAC on wheels, a pre-built 10g solution that provides an entire working Oracle Grid running 10g RAC, servers, network, and Pillar storage, all on one mobile platform.

"Pillar has certainly made good on its word to continue delivering Application-Aware capabilities to its Axiom platform. Pillar offers one of the most tightly integrated storage systems for Oracle databases," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. "Applications are the driving force in any data center, and IT infrastructure needs to optimize the performance and availability of those applications. In my view, Pillar’s focus on delivering a storage infrastructure that attempts to maximize the value of an organization’s business value is indeed the right approach."

For organizations like Preferred Credit, a finance company that specializes in the direct-to-consumer market, tight integration with the Pillar Axiom and Oracle databases is essential. The company experienced rapid growth over the past five years, and as a result required a new storage environment to meet its growing needs – even with a limited budget and staff to manage that system. Preferred Credit chose Pillar for its unique Application-Aware capabilities and unrivaled integration with all Oracle platforms and applications.

"Our business is all about customer service. As Preferred Credit continues to grow, we are constantly looking for better ways to meet our customers’ needs," said Steve Halvorson, network administrator, Preferred Credit. "A SAN solution from Pillar not only enabled better data protection, but also provided the quality of service we needed at a cost-effective price. With the Axiom’s Application-Aware capability, we have a greater peace of mind with Pillar as it allows us to truly manage our storage assets more efficiently, while laying the groundwork for disaster recovery."

Pillar is showcasing its Oracle application profiles in the Axiom storage system at this week’s Oracle OpenWorld in the South Moscone Center in San Francisco.