EMC Corp. has set its sights on Oracle Corp. shops with the latest upgrade to its Proven Solutions business.
The update features a series of best practices that will allow EMC customers to take full advantage of new technologies including Oracle’s Database 11g release. With the Proven Solution package, Oracle shops will be able to better utilize Oracle Database 11g with EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max or EMC Clariion CX-4 networked storage systems, the company said.
EMC’s Proven Solutions offering looks to provide best practices tips for installing and running EMC products with complementary technologies from IT giants like Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp, SAP AG, and VMware Inc. The program stresses interoperability to customers either through user guides or on-premise IT services.
The new Proven Solutions package will also address the company’s recently released Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) technology, which automates the movement and placement of data across storage resources as needed. EMC’s new offering will help customers take advantage of FAST to optimize Oracle workloads as they change.
Rich Wells, senior director of global database solutions for EMC, said customers that build FAST intelligence with Oracle are able to look right into the database applications and find new ways to boost performance and reduce costs.
“You can uncover policies where you put your most mission-critical performance-oriented transactions on embedded flash drives,” he said. “Your less mission-critical, but increasingly important performance transactions can go on fibre channel. And the ones you really don’t want to pay a lot for the transaction — but need to keep for governance purposes — you can put that on SATA, which is your lowest cost option.”
With the update, the company will add to several dozen existing Proven Solution packages it already offers for Oracle customers, said Mark Peters, a senior analyst who covers storage systems for Enterprise Strategy Group
“The two organizations share literally thousands of customers that, frankly, have every good reason to expect them to work together, minimize and preclude issues and, wherever possible, to add value,” he said.
Peters added that both EMC’s FAST and Oracle’s 11g products are both relatively new to the market and can provide value when used together.
The fact that EMC has undergone a massive transformation to become one of Oracle’s largest customers should give customers a good idea of how effective this Proven Solutions offering might be for IT shops, he said.
“This new ‘Proven Solution’ is therefore not just about generic interoperability, but also specifically documents the best practices that it has uncovered and developed in deploying lots — over 50, I believe — of Oracle modules,” Peters added.
EMC said that customers can expect new updates to the Proven Solutions business every three to six months. It also promised a round of solutions based on unified storage interoperability before the end of the year.