Dell’s storage teams were well represented this year at Oracle OpenWorld 2018 with a heavy focus on enabling Oracle DBAs and application owners to take advantage of Dell’s modern infrastructure solutions. On the show floor, the Dell booth contained both PowerMax and XtremIO X2 arrays with OLTP simulations taking place to highlight the powerful capabilities of our platforms. The multi-dimensional scale-up/scale-out arrays meet the most demanding production workloads and still have plenty of cycles remaining to consolidate test/dev, patch testing, near real-time analytics, data warehousing and more.
PowerMax, the world’s fastest storage array with 10M IOPS and 150GBps throughput, was on display; the Oracle OpenWorld crowd was eager to ask questions and take pictures of it. The consolidation of Oracle databases has never been easier than with the 125,000 IOPS per U of rack space that PowerMax yields. One happy customer was caught hugging the array J and said, “So this is what it looks like… we have been running on it now for 2 months and performance has never been better.”
The XtremIO X2 was also highlighted as part of the Dell Ready Solutions for Oracle with Data Protection Ready Bundle. Announced the Friday prior to the show, this solution highlights the enterprise-class protection and provisioning that is possible when leveraging Dell’s XtremIO X2 with Data Domain storage.
The ability to run OLAP, OLTP, and test/dev in a single virtualized environment while safeguarding availability, lowering costs, and increasing productivity yields significant advantages. This Ready Solution for Oracle was designed to support the production OLTP and OLAP applications and test/dev environments simultaneously without sacrificing performance or storage space. With these Oracle databases and other applications coexisting and functioning optimally, you gain a wide spectrum of benefits, including:
- Enhanced IOPS with sub-0.85 millisecond response times
- Efficient operation of multiple applications in the same rack while saving on licensing costs
- Breakthrough simplicity for deployment, management, and support
- Management by DBAs of their own backup and recovery processes without the assistance of backup administrators
- Exceptional performance, reducing backup times maintenance windows
- Minimal impact on production workloads while performing backups or recovery, enabling DBAs to run production simultaneously with backup windows
- Integration of the hardware stack, drivers, and other components by the same common vendor
- Reduction of the customer’s TCO due to purchase of an optimal hardware stack with this solution
Our strong storage portfolio was also on display during the in-booth theater presentations, happening every 30 minutes and always to beyond capacity crowds. Our presentations focused on not only the storage platforms but also Dell AppSync, the complementary software that simplifies, orchestrates, and automates the process of generating and consuming copies of production data directly from the Dell primary storage arrays. With AppSync, Oracle DBAs are able to take advantage of the scheduled and ad-hoc protection capabilities of our arrays via snapshots as well as manage multiple generations of database copies for repurposing of Oracle databases.
Snapshots are the most space efficient way to repurpose a database and mount to different servers for use cases like test/dev, analytics, backup and more. Whether writing to production or the snapshot copy, both arrays are able to ensure space efficiency with thin provisioning, deduplication, and compression. Beyond that, policy-based QoS can easily be implemented to prevent noisy neighbor situations from non-mission critical databases and ensure that the production databases are getting the bandwidth and latency they require.
We will see you back at the Moscone Center next year!
