EMC and Oracle are two big IT dots that one does not automatically connect very often. After all, Oracle is trying to become the newest full-service systems provider and doesn't need EMC to provide storage hardware, for one thing.
However, a lot of IT shops use both EMC and Oracle products, so somebody thought there had better be some across-the-data center services ready if needed.
On Sept. 15, EMC's growing services division revealed a new menu of services that focus on setting the table for private cloud deployments that include Oracle databases and EMC storage.
The new offerings are intended to help enterprises improve operational efficiency and control costs using virtualized environments that deploy one or more business applications.
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They also are designed for any IT environment: testing, development, standard production, OLTP (online transactional processing)-even data warehouse systems.
EMC is the latest Tier 1 hardware-centric vendor to beef up its services division in an effort to take some business away from IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Dell is another following this same road.
The new offerings from EMC Consulting are aimed at helping enterprises with Oracle and other application environments lower costs, increase efficiency and improve business agility through best practices and applied expertise in business intelligence, data warehousing and application performance, the company said.
"No two enterprises are exactly alike, and IT professionals know this all too well," said Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
"As a result, they look to their [primary] vendors for the most relevant approaches to their particular challenges and aspirations. The EMC/Oracle relationship is an example of how this need can be met further with on-site experts who can apply practical analysis to improve architectures as well as proven interoperability among key technologies to get the most out of investments in every way possible."
The new private cloud-type services, as described by EMC, help customers to: assimilate, analyze and track performance metrics to both plan and build business intelligence and performance management systems that align with strategic objectives; collect, consolidate and organize data required for reporting and pervasive analytics when designing and implementing a data warehouse; and understand business impact, develop plans, design architecture and assess transition readiness when building a virtualized enterprise application environment.
Tools used alongside these services, as described by EMC, include:
Rapid deployment and scale-out for Oracle E-Business Suite, enabled by EMC RecoverPoint, EMC Replication Manager, and VMware vSphere: These can provision up to 10 virtual machines for test and development using VMware vSphere and automated updates through EMC RecoverPoint and EMC Replication Manager, EMC said.
EMC FASTCache with Oracle OLTP Database Applications, which increased Oracle production database transactions substantially per minute.
EMC IT's migration to the open, expandable Oracle BI Grid: This is designed to improve performance in an Oracle Database 11g data warehouse by implementing EMC Symmetrix VMAX with EMC Enterprise Flash Drives for Oracle.
Virtual provisioning on EMCSymmetrix VMAX with Oracle Database 10g and 11g: EMC claims this increases the speed of Oracle Database 11g transactions without deploying additional storage capacity.
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