Why choose Vblock with Oracle

Larry Grant, an Oracle Specialist here at EMC presents us with a whole plethora of reasons why Vblock is a great choice for an Oracle environment.

Why Vblock

1.    It's a Pre built, Pre configured, Fully integrated and Certified offering, with a single 1-800 number to call for service.

2.    You aren't limited to what applications you run, including; Oracle Database, Oracle Weblogic, other Oracle apps, as well as non Oracle apps such as Websphere, Tomcat, Apache, MS Exchange, MS Sharepoint, Windows, Linux, and other software.

3.    Vblock is a full 5 nines solution, offering the industries leading storage, networking and compute tiers to ensure you the highest levels of availability and data protection and security.

4.    Run any version of Oracle database, not just 11g.

5.    Run RAC or non RAC single instance databases.

6.    Mix and match virtualization on some nodes and physical on other nodes, giving you the best of both worlds. If you aren't comfortable virtualizing Oracle in production, but are willing to Virtualize everything else, why have two different environments. On Vblock you can do both from a single platform.

7.    With an EMC VNX or VMAX storage array powering the Vblock, you aren't limited to just mirroring. You can choose Raid 0,1,5,6 and 10 configuration. Choose what's right for you, and even mix and match across different drives.

8.    Leverage EMC FAST VP and FAST Cache to enable automatic storage tiering of your data across Enterprise Flash Drives, SAS/FC and NL-SAS/SATA. The intelligence behind FAST will dynamically move data based on real usage patterns, not based on date ranges or convoluted business logic. It's the best way in the industry to optimize performance while minimizing cost, and it's all automatic.

9.    Provides writeable flash storage in both persistent and cache modes, achieving improved write performance and efficiencies.

10.    Leverage best of breed replication solutions such as SRDF, Recoverpoint, or Dataguard. With SRDF and Recoverpoint you aren't limited to just the database files, so you can use a single replication strategy for all your DR needs.

11.    Choose from best of breed backup options, including Avamar, Data Domain or RMan. Choose what's right for your business and don't be locked in to a single choice.

12.    Leverage HW snaps and clones to provide the highest efficiencies of offloading storage tasks to the storage array where they run best. Also the use of snaps stores only the delta changes further saving disk space.

13.    Vblock has similar performance features to Exadata, including Enterprise Flash Drives, Westmere Processors, 10 GbE Ethernet (load balanced across 4 per node for 40 GbE throughput). Runs Oracle 11g, and supports 11g advanced features such as Advanced Compression. Coupled with EMC's FAST and Power Path to optimize storage tiering you have an extremely fast and balanced configuration.

14.    When SQL offloading is required for special data warehousing and analytics, look at Greenplum as an alternative. Greenplum's Chorus is a virtual node that can run within the Vblock, or you can use Hadoop to automate the aggregation and streaming of data out of your OLTP database on Vblock into a Greenplum appliance.

15.    Scale a single Vblock 700 to nearly 2000 drives.

16.    Vblock is a best of breed solution, developed by a coalition that includes VMware, Cisco, EMC and Intel. All four companies are leaders in their respective space and provide the only best of breed solution as a single integrated and supported product, not just a reference architecture.