EMC Doubles Performance of Oracle Database 11g RAC Running OLTP Workloads

At Oracle OpenWorld, EMC Corporation announced an EMC Proven Solution, as well as a best practices white paper developed that can help improve Oracle customers’ database performance and accelerate their journey to the cloud.

Based on EMC VNX unified storage and using EMC FAST Cache, an extendable cache with up to 4TB of Flash drives that automatically responds to busy workloads, the new EMC Proven Oracle Performance Solution can double Oracle transactions per minute with up to 80% faster response times, while generating up to 170% more IOPS in both physical and virtualized Oracle Database 11g RAC environments. It maps out a logical approach to combine EMC VNX unified storage with Oracle’s Direct NFS feature to increase performance of Oracle databases on both physical and virtual machines.

The white paper illustrates how EMC experienced data growth in its 15 TB Oracle Database 11g Global Data Warehouse, and after deploying the EMC Greenplum Data Computing Appliance, achieved up to 13x faster queries for Big Data applications and decreased data load times from six days to just 29 minutes. The visualization of Big Data analytics enabled faster identification of trends and issues with the ability to now create dashboards automatically, on-the-fly versus compiling point-in-time batch reports.

EMC Symmetrix VMAX enterprise storage systems and software are deployed in physical and virtualized, mission-critical Oracle database and application environments. EMC has numerous EMC Proven solutions and whitepapers designed to help customers maximize performance, scalability, availability and ease of management of their Oracle infrastructure with Symmetrix VMAX.

EMC also announced that it has been named by customers as the #1 storage choice for Oracle and other mission critical environments according to a new survey by IDC (Storage Users Demand Study 2011 – Spring Edition: Unlocking the Minds of Storage Users – September 2011 – Doc # 230148)). The survey ranks the storage vendors based on how end-users are deploying their technology with enterprise applications and it shows that more customers choose EMC storage than any other storage for their Oracle environments. In addition, EMC is also the top vendor for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, SAP, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Home Directories.

During keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, EMC Chairman and CEO, Joe Tucci, and EMC President and COO of Information Infrastructure Products, Pat Gelsinger, outlined for the more than 45,000 conference attendees how the journey to cloud computing (private clouds, public clouds and, ultimately, hybrid clouds) is transforming IT infrastructure, applications and end-user device layers, ushering in a wave of disruptive change unlike anything the industry has ever experienced. They also provided insight into some of the ground breaking tools and technologies that are helping to unlock the value of Big Data.

Dennis Robinson, Director, Technical Infrastructure, GENEX Services, Inc., said: "GENEX provides insurers, employers and third party administrators with managed care solutions and information management capabilities. In order to grow our business it is critical to be able to scale our IT infrastructure and crunch large chunks of data efficiently and cost effectively. Since replacing our legacy storage and deploying EMC VNX unified storage and FAST Suite technology in a VMware vSphere environment, we’ve seen a major difference in our overall performance and have increased our business agility with the ability to handle multiple transactions at a time. Virtualizing Oracle on EMC storage with VMware vSphere has played a key role in accelerating our journey to the cloud. We’re pleased to see EMC investing in validated solutions that help us capture the potential performance enhancements and cost savings available with an integrated EMC, VMware and Oracle environment."

Natalya Yezhkova, Research Director of IDC’s Worldwide Storage Systems Research and Lead Analyst on the Storage Users Demand Study (SUDS), said: "IDC initiated its biannual worldwide survey of end-users that measures how storage capacity is consumed by the most widely-used business applications. The data shows more users use EMC, which accounted for nearly a quarter of external terabytes shipped worldwide in the first half of 2011, to run not only Oracle environments, but six other major enterprise applications we surveyed."

Prasad Rampalli, Senior Vice President, Global Solutions, EMC Corporation, said: "With the new EMC Proven Solution and best practices white paper EMC is providing customers with real-world examples that they can use to achieve unprecedented cost savings and Oracle performance improvements by leveraging EMC technology in both physical and VMware vSphere virtual environments. We’re 100% focused on accelerating our customers’ journey to the cloud and continue to develop solutions and best practices that leverage EMC technology capabilities to more cost effectively analyze, manage, and protect complex, ever-growing amounts of information in their Oracle environments."