Oracle, EMC Ease Application Data Storage

Oracle Corp. and EMC Corp. last week announced joint offerings designed to enhance service and support of their respective technologies as well as make them easier to use.

The new Oracle on EMC Database Accelerator Service, announced at Oracle AppsWorld in San Diego, is designed to help companies transition from direct-attached storage to what EMC officials said are more cost-effective and flexible networked storage environments. As part of the service, representatives from both companies work with customers to design, deploy and optimize EMC storage systems, software and networks running with Oracle database software. The service will encompass professionals from EMC Global Services and Oracle Consulting.

Accelerator Service is the second phase of the companies advanced services strategy to offer shared customers enhanced services and support. The first was the unveiling last September of the Joint Service Center, a facility staffed by service engineers from both companies that also serves as a dedicated lab to duplicate customer environments and proactively identify potential problem areas.

Officials from Oracle, of Redwood Shores, Calif., and EMC, of Hopkinton, Mass., said Accelerator Service is the first in a suite of offerings geared toward providing customers with a quick and easy way to get Oracle databases running on EMCs Automated Networked Storage solution. The EMC offering brings storage area networking, network-attached storage and content-addressed storage environments together in an integrated and networked storage infrastructure. The companies will release other suite offerings over the course of the coming year.

Also at AppsWorld, the two companies announced a best-practice approach to creating clones of Oracles Oracle11i applications. Using a combination of EMC TimeFinder software and the Oracle Automatic System Configuration utility, known as AutoConfig, IT departments can build a reference copy of an application that can be used for testing, business continuity planning, backup and recovery, data warehouse loading, and hardware migrations, the two companies said.

Such clones have become necessary to keep integrated enterprise applications up and running all the time.

Experts said joint servicing works out well for Oracle and EMC customers for a few reasons. First, with the continuing growth of data flowing from enterprise and e-business applications, databases are getting much larger. Therefore, enterprises are seeing the need for more databases to work in conjunction with storage devices to handle that glut of data.

“In the distant future, well have much larger databases, so this kind of joint alliance to help such customers make sure their environment is available [sounds great],” said Noel Yuhanna, an analyst at Giga Information Group Inc., in Santa Clara, Calif.

More specifically, EMC and Oracle working hand in glove makes sense because EMC storage devices traditionally are closely serviced by EMC rather than in-house IT staff, Yuhanna said.