Enterprises are under growing urgency to optimize the efficiency of their Oracle databases. IT decision-makers and business leaders are constantly pushing the boundaries of their infrastructures and applications for speed, agility, high availability and cost efficiencies. It makes sense, of course. More than ever, businesses are reliant on their technology infrastructures as touch points for customer interactions and drivers of business innovation. Any issues with performance or availability can have dramatic implications on the bottom line, and the Oracle database is typically the foundation for the mission-critical applications that define these customer touch points and business innovations, from online transaction processing (OLTP) to data warehousing to online analytical processing. What s more, as enterprises begin to feel comfortable bringing their Oracle databases into more highly virtualized and cloud environments, IT leaders are looking for infrastructure platforms that offer a clear path to virtualization, along with simplified scalability to address the compute, network and storage capacities required for ever-growing Oracle databases. Choosing a storage infrastructure that maximizes speed and performance, along with agility, high availability, cost efficiencies, scalability and virtualization capabilities, is a critical step in upgrading your Oracle databases to deliver on the promise of next-generation IT applications. Oracle has introduced engineered systems such as Oracle Exadata to address some of these performance and scalability challenges. But do Oracleengineered systems offer customers the best opportunity for a cost-efficient and scalable solution? EMC has more than 75,000 joint customers with Oracle, many of which use EMC Symmetrix VMAX for their Oracle infrastructure. In discussions with customers, EMC has found consistent themes around 1
the value customers are seeing from using EMC for their Oracle database environments. Here are 10 reasons why customers are deploying Oracle : #1. Lower Total Cost of Ownership Optimizing total cost of ownership (TCO) for Oracle environments involves several key variables. Organizations have to take into account the software from Oracle, database licenses and maintenance, as well as the infrastructure to support the environment, including operating systems, servers, storage and networking. Finally, there are the database administrators (DBA) and IT infrastructure teams required to manage the environment. One of the largest variables in calculating TCO for Oracle database environments is the amount of CPU required to drive Oracle database workloads. For many customers, this variable correlates directly to their database license cost with Oracle, whether they are paying by CPU or based on a negotiated enterprise license agreement. Virtualization has proved to be a powerful tool that allows more Oracle software to be deployed on less CPU, providing strong economic benefits. What EMC has seen recently as well is that the optimized use of flash technology can have a tremendous positive impact on optimizing database performance and reducing CPU I/O wait times. This optimization of Oracle CPU can have a significant positive effect on optimizing the TCO of Oracle database environments. In a recent analysis by Wikibon.org, EMC, Oracle and VMware customers said small investments in flash technology used with virtualization software had a dramatic effect on reducing Oracle TCO by 26%. 1 And the best part is that the technology can be deployed using the same networking infrastructure already in place while supporting open, industry-standard servers and operating systems, which provides customers with a lot of flexibility. #2. Drive Consolidation Through a Flexible, Open Architecture Nearly 90% of all Oracle customers run more than just Oracle databases. Many run combinations of Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange and Share- Point, as well as SAP applications. In addition, most Oracle customers 1 Virtualization of Oracle Evolves to Best Practice for Production Systems, Wikibon.org, April 26, 2013 2
run multiple versions of Oracle databases. Having a storage architecture that provides for open flexibility and high degrees of scalability not only allows Oracle customers to consolidate their Oracle databases, but also provides a single infrastructure for mixed database and application workloads. While this results in consolidation benefits in the short-term for existing databases and applications, an open EMC Symmetrix VMAX architecture also enables the flexibility to support multiple virtualization hypervisors, including VMware vsphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle VM. #3. Optimize Oracle Database Performance Optimization of Oracle database performance is a continuous focus for enterprises today. Most Oracle customers address performance optimization through repeated tuning of the database, combined with adding more memory or upgrading servers. This can impact system availability. EMC has found that addressing performance challenges starts with properly identifying where optimization is needed and then applying the right solution at the right level of the Oracle data path. However, Oracle workloads can change daily, weekly or over the course of many months, and most customers want to avoid having to constantly retune and adjust their IT infrastructure. EMC has been a leading driver of the use of flash technology in Oracle database environments, being the first to introduce the use of enterprise flash drives in Oracle environments several years ago on EMC Symmetrix. Since then, EMC has evolved the use of flash technology beyond the storage array, moving into the server network and into the Oracle database server itself. EMC has tested and validated many use cases for running Oracle in physical or virtual database environments where just a little flash can have a significant impact on Oracle database performance, driving up to three times more transactions per minute, significantly increasing IOPS and reducing latency by as much as 80%. Most recently, EMC performed a series of mixed-workload OLTP and data warehouse tests and Cisco Unified Computing System servers in a virtualized Oracle environment. The results showed that the EMC/Cisco solution can deliver performance of 2.7M read IOPS and 100 GBps read scan rates for data warehouse systems. These are the highest numbers seen publicly for Oracle database workloads today. Using EMC Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP), Oracle customers can proactively identify and relocate Oracle databases or data within the databases onto specific sets of storage tiers. Such automation allows for the optimal use of flash technology, as it prioritizes 3
those Oracle workloads that need flash at specific times to boost performance or decrease latency, but then rebalances workloads to lower-cost storage as workload requirements change. The result for Oracle customers is that they spend 80% less time tuning the Oracle database and avoid the downtime normally required to rebalance and reconfigure storage to meet database performance needs. #4. Deliver Five 9s Availability Oracle databases often support the most critical applications in the enterprise. For most customers, five 9s (99.999%) availability is a must. EMC VMAX provides five 9s-plus availability within the platform, including a robust, fault-tolerant architecture and redundant internal components. In addition, EMC VMAX supports non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades, as well as maintenance. Many other solutions for Oracle offer only three 9s availability and require two or three levels of mirroring of production data to achieve five 9s availability. This dramatically affects usable storage capacity and increases cost of ownership. Think about it: Five 9s availability means five minutes of downtime over the course of a year, while three 9s availability means more than eight hours of downtime a year. Can your business really afford nearly 500 minutes of incremental downtime? EMC VMAX also offers customers the option to choose RAID levels of protection, including RAID 10 or parity RAID models. This increases flexibility in terms of balancing protection levels for Oracle database files versus redo logs or other data, and delivers the required protection at the lowest cost. Many alternative solutions only allow for RAID 10, which increases cost unnecessarily. Beyond inherent hardware availability, a fact of life for many Oracle customers is data corruption, which can occur as the Oracle database data is transferred across the IT infrastructure stack. Minimizing impact from data corruption is most effectively achieved through quickly identifying the corruption once it occurs and, most important, preventing it from proliferating onto the storage system. EMC VMAX provides the highest level of security and data integrity, with zero data loss. EMC has worked closely with Oracle to integrate with Oracle s Database Checksum feature to embrace T10 standards for block zeroing. As a result, EMC VMAX solutions support the full efficacy of the block of data throughout the entire I/O path. T10 support and integration with Oracle allow faster identification of database corruptions, minimizing downtime and impact to the business. 4
#5. Provide Seamless Provisioning and Growth As Oracle environments grow, they require additional storage capacity. In traditional storage architectures, adding capacity involves downtime. Even in engineered systems, if additional storage capacity is needed, in many cases the entire engineered system must be scaled, requiring the addition of compute power, network bandwidth and database software. The open architecture of EMC VMAX allows for a virtual provisioning approach within the storage array for focused, granular capacity planning and growth management. With virtual provisioning, VMAX is able to divide up physical storage resources into virtual pools, which can be shared across multiple databases supported. Virtual pools can be provisioned or de-provisioned to database servers as needed, while Oracle databases remain online and active. For customers running Oracle Automatic Storage Management, the EMC virtual provisioning architecture complements this approach and integrates with Oracle s Storage Reclamation Utility to reclaim up to 50% more unused storage capacity through virtual provisioning. #6. Accelerate Oracle Lifecycle Management Managing the lifecycle of Oracle databases is a critical ongoing task for both IT infrastructure teams and Oracle DBAs. This includes the setup and management of copies of Oracle data in production and preproduction environments. EMC Symmetrix VMAX includes the ability to leverage clones and snapshots within the array. Clones are full-volume, write-for-write copies of the database that are useful for full database recovery at online speeds. A unique aspect of EMC VMAX is the ability to ensure transactional consistency during replication so that all Oracle databases are copied with write-order integrity. EMC VMAX also allows for the creation of space-saving snapshots, which are read/writeable images of Oracle database files that can be quickly created, modified or removed for multiple purposes. Through these two technologies, Oracle DBAs can control clones and snapshots to quickly set up database recovery environments, as well as test, development and maintenance environments. Using storage clones can be a much faster and more efficient method to recover from database corruptions versus performing a recovery from Oracle Recovery Manager alone. For test and development, EMC testing results have shown that the Oracle test and development process can be accelerated up to nine times faster using storage array snapshots. Many alternative solutions today require multiple separate platforms 5
to support production or test and development. With EMC VMAX, these multiple environments can be housed within a single EMC VMAX, delivering DBAs and storage teams the efficiency and control they need, while maintaining cost control for IT as a whole. #7. Improve Data Protection As more applications and databases are consolidated in Oracle environments, keeping the infrastructure available continuously becomes even more critical. Many Oracle customers use Oracle Data Guard to protect their databases, but Data Guard does not enable protection of the entire software and infrastructure stack. Some customer service-level agreements require fast, complete recovery of all application components, not just the database files. EMC RecoverPoint is a comprehensive data protection solution providing concurrent local and remote data protection. It is fully leveraged through EMC Replication Manager as an additional replication option for Oracle DBAs. RecoverPoint is a technology that resides in the network, allowing all Oracle writes to be tracked in a Recovery Journal before they are written to disk. Oracle data is then compressed and deduplicated before being shipped to a remote site, reducing the network bandwidth requirements by as much as 90% to allow for longer-distance replication. Should a recovery be necessary, the Recovery Journal can be used to roll back the complete Oracle software stack to any point in time for full recovery. Like EMC VMAX replication, RecoverPoint also preserves write-order fidelity and leverages EMC consistency group technology during replication, ensuring full recoverability even during rolling disasters or resynchronization. With EMC RecoverPoint, Oracle DBAs can achieve: Continuous Data Protection: CDP continuously captures and stores data modifications locally, enabling local recovery from any point in time, with no data loss. Both synchronous and asynchronous replications are supported. Continuous Remote Replication: CRR supports synchronous and asynchronous replication between remote sites over Fibre Channel and a WAN. Synchronous replication is supported when the remote sites are connected through Fibre Channel and provides a zero recovery point objective (RPO). Asynchronous replication provides crash-consistent protection and recovery to specific points in time, with a small RPO. 6
#8. Enable Nonstop Oracle Operations Over Distance Many Oracle customers leverage Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), which allow Oracle databases to be run across multiple servers with simultaneous read/write access. Oracle RAC users have been challenged to stretch their Oracle RAC configurations over distance. As a result, most RAC users have single-site configurations and leverage host- or array-based data replication solutions for disaster recovery. EMC VPLEX is a technology deployed in the storage area network that enables the same data to exist in two separate geographical locations and to be accessed and updated in both locations at the same time. Working with EMC, Oracle has certified the use of EMC VPLEX with Oracle RAC configurations over Metropolitan distances. Now, Oracle RAC can be configured with VPLEX Metro over extended distances in a deployment that is certified and supported by Oracle. VPLEX Metro provides Oracle RAC users simultaneous access to the same data at both locations yet is managed as though it is only one site. The Oracle hosts only need to connect to the local VPLEX cluster. This means no complex cross-connect and no costly host CPU cycles consumed on mirroring I/O is sent only once from the host to the VPLEX, and then VPLEX manages the replication. Oracle RAC clusters today can be stretched across data centers, but distance is limited, with Oracle recommending that customers keep RAC nodes within 10 kilometers. EMC VPLEX extends the ability of Oracle RAC to be in active-active mode up to a distance of 100 kilometers between sites. This allows greater distance for Oracle stretch RAC clusters while keeping the round-trip time to 5 milliseconds or less. Oracle DBAs and IT teams can now collaborate on the same Oracle data over distance with simultaneous read/write access, and enable seamless database and application failover without downtime. #9. Set a Path for Virtualization Over the past several years, Oracle customers have increasingly virtualized their Oracle database environments. This began initially with test, development, and Tier 2 and Tier 3 database workloads, and has evolved today to where we see many Oracle customers virtualizing even their most mission-critical production Oracle databases. With EMC VMAX open architecture, Oracle customers can seamlessly adopt a virtualization strategy inclusive of VMware vsphere for their Oracle databases or Oracle VM. Customers can also leverage EMC VMAX for virtualized Microsoft databases and applications with Hyper-V. 7
#10. Draw Upon Industry-Leading Knowledge and Experience EMC has been in partnership with Oracle for more than 15 years, supporting more than 75,000 joint customers worldwide. In fact, more Oracle databases run on EMC storage than on any other storage platform. 2 With its vast experience deploying storage for Oracle databases all over the world, EMC recognizes that, due to the varying nature of Oracle workloads, the underlying storage infrastructure works best when it is approached as an intelligent, self-adjusting tiered-storage architecture, and not as a single, monolithic entity. To help Oracle customers and their DBA and IT teams design and optimize their Oracle database infrastructure, EMC has set up a focused online community for Oracle customers: https://community.emc.com/community/connect/everything_oracle Here Oracle customers can access the latest tested and documented solutions, interact with EMC Oracle Solution experts, and hear about the latest EMC/Oracle events and training. Conclusion If your organization is at the point where it is ready to expand or upgrade its Oracle database platform, it is important to build on a platform that will deliver on the key requirements of today s IT infrastructures: speed, performance, availability, resiliency, cost efficiency, scalability and support for virtualization and cloud computing. When you carefully examine the options and issues discussed in this paper, it becomes clear that the comparison between an Oracle Exadata solution and an EMC VMAX open-stack storage solution is really no comparison at all. Thinking about Oracle Exadata? Contact EMC instead. 2 Storage Users Demand Study 2012, Fall Edition, IDC 8