3PAR Certifies Oracle VM

3PAR, Inc. announced certification and support for Oracle VM, a server virtualization solution that offers efficient and cost-effective virtualization for both Oracle and non-Oracle applications.

3PAR support for Oracle VM gives 3PAR Utility Storage customers the ability to virtualize mission-critical applications including Oracle Database on a fully certified virtualization solution running on the 3PAR InServ Storage Server. The combination of Oracle VM software and 3PAR Utility Storage offers joint customers the opportunity to reap infrastructure and administrative savings in public and private cloud datacenters.

"3PAR Utility Storage has brought high levels of efficiency, performance, and flexibility to our Oracle Red Stack cloud service offering," said Marc A. Caruso, Vice President of Service Management at Data Intensity, Inc. "3PAR’s support for Oracle VM means that we can deliver mission-critical applications on a shared, virtualized, cloud-ready storage platform with the quality-of-service and agility that our customers need."

Enhanced Consolidation
3PAR Utility Storage has been shown to increase virtual server performance, which in many cases allows server virtualization customers to deploy twice the number of virtual machines per physical server (thereby doubling VM density). This means that Oracle VM users may be able to deploy significantly fewer physical servers by choosing 3PAR Utility Storage over other storage arrays.

Administration that Is ‘Autonomic’
3PAR Utility Storage customers have demonstrated the ability to reduce storage administration time by up to 90% in virtual server environments due to 3PAR’s autonomic provisioning, management, and tiering features, which were designed to complement the dynamic nature of virtualized server deployments. Combining the administration benefits of highly virtualized 3PAR Utility Storage with Oracle VM can produce a leaner, more scalable, and more agile datacenter that responds intelligently to changing user and application workloads without administrator intervention.

Cost Savings
3PAR thin technologies reduce customer storage capacity requirements by breaking the traditional link between allocated and purchased capacity. For example, by leveraging 3PAR Thin Provisioning software during the up-front provisioning of storage resources, Oracle Database customers are able to purchase and consume physical storage capacity only as needed. In addition, 3PAR and Oracle have developed the ability to maintain storage efficiency in Oracle Database 11g and 10g environments by reclaiming unused space with 3PAR Thin Persistence and Oracle’s Automatic Storage Management (ASM) Storage Reclamation utility – a first for both storage and database platforms.

"Oracle VM makes applications easier to deploy, manage, and support by facilitating virtualization as part of a fully integrated, tested, and certified solution," said Monica Kumar, senior director, Product Marketing, Oracle. "When combined with a virtualized storage system purpose-built for the cloud like 3PAR’s, these benefits are amplified."

"When deploying mission-critical applications in a cloud datacenter, highly agile and efficient storage is crucial," said Craig Nunes, 3PAR Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. "3PAR Utility Storage is already the preferred storage platform among the world’s leading Hosting Service Providers. With support for Oracle VM, joint 3PAR and Oracle customers building private and public clouds can easily create a flexible, low-cost infrastructure for the virtualization of mission-critical applications, and for expanding their cloud-based service offerings – for example, by offering Oracle VM as a service."

Availability of Oracle VM on 3PAR will begin in November 2010. 3PAR is a Gold level partner of the Oracle PartnerNetwork.