EMC Corp. announced on Monday its first service provider partnership with Oracle Corp. to sell and install EMC’s DatabaseXtender suite of products, which analyze databases and then migrate older or inactive records off expensive primary storage and onto online secondary disk systems.
The DatabaseXtender suite, which arose in part from EMC’s acquisition of Legato Systems Inc. last year, includes DatabaseXtender Accelerator and DatabaseXtender Analyzer. The Analyzer looks at what applications are consuming a database, and DatabaseXtender prunes data, reducing the rate of database use.
The announcement follows EMC’s decision last year to release a service offering around its product and services around Oracle. Steve Kennison, an analyst at Enterprise Storage Group, said the service agreement with Oracle “is an augmentation to that.”
“DataBaseXtender allows for better migration and movement of data to proper storage classes via policies,” Kennison said. “This service really helps the IT professional, after EMC leaves, continue to be successful in managing storage underneath a database.”
Both EMC and Oracle can deliver service or consulting for the products being released, including in-depth assessments and analysis of a customer’s data to determine which records should be archived, said Clint Vaughn, director of technology and strategy at EMC.
“Oracle has certain rules and procedures in place that people are maniacal about not breaking. This technology agreement enables that,” he said.
Part of the DatabaseXtender software resides in the database and part resides in the business application. For example, DataXtender Analyzer might look at an Oracle database with an accounts receivable, human resources and inventory application and determine the amount of storage those business applications take up.
DataXtender could then project the growth of each business module. If, for example, the software determined the accounts receivable application was growing at 60 per cent, DatabaseXtender Accelerator would then proactively taper that particular business module’s growth down to 25 per cent by trimming older data.
EMC DatabaseXtender Accelerator for Oracle E-Business Suite is expected to be available in North America on Feb. 17 and worldwide later this year.
Derrell James, vice-president of technology solutions at EMC, said rolling out the software would cost a company about US$150,000 on average. He said joint on-site service teams of Oracle and EMC technicians could also stay and run the infrastructure according to service level agreements for a fixed, per-gigabyte price.
The analysis, James said, would be based on the IT Infrastructure Library standard, which is a set of rules for how to deliver IT services more efficiently by improving management processes across IT departments that use databases and other systems.
“What we see customers asking for is…help reducing cost, meeting regulatory requirements and increasing service levels. And they want to know how they can get better systems performance and data availability,” James said.
