Storage tips to enterprise CIOs by Oracle

Amit Malhotra, senior director, Storage Sales, JAPAC, Systems Division, Oracle, has share important tips to enterprise CIOs to select the right storage solutions.

Oracle Storage enables enterprises to simplify IT environments so they can operate more efficiently, more cost effectively, and be more responsive to dynamic business needs. Its storage products and application-engineered storage solutions are co-developed with Oracle software to run faster, more efficiently, and offer unsurpassed capabilities for heterogeneous data centers.

As the volume and value of data grows beyond online resources and backup windows, Oracle’s StorageTek tape and library solutions help companies manage complexity, control costs, and deliver on service-level agreements. With the world’s highest capacity and highest performance drives, including the world’s first exabyte storage system, enterprise tape libraries that provide 24×7 availability, and the most scalable, integrated tiered storage environment, StorageTek tape storage systems enable customers to reduce backup windows, maximize archive access, and lower your total cost of ownership.

Technology trends

“We have observed that the demand for applications engineered storage is increasing by every passing day. This is one of the most important trends that are shaping the storage market. We have witnessed that there is no technology has been changing as rapidly as data storage systems,” said Amit Malhotra, senior director, Storage Sales, JAPAC, Systems Division, Oracle.

Data storage systems have evolved to become highly efficient through the use of thin provisioning, deduplication, compression and virtualization technologies. With data becoming more valuable with each passing day, storage systems have also evolved to provide data insurance to tackle the increasing complexities of data protection, disaster tolerance, disaster recovery and continuous data availability.

Applications now have become more diverse than similar.  The requirements of external shared data storage system are moving well beyond performance, capacity, and data protection. As an example, Oracle databases plus business applications that run on Oracle servers and storage, backup and replication software is demanding their attached external shared data storage to be aware of their peer applications and not just simply be a resource. They are demanding that each have intimate knowledge of the other.

It is critical for enterprises to focus on an integrated approach where applications and storage systems are engineered to work together.

Though expensive, the adoption of flash technology is also gaining momentum this year. The flash market will see increased growth as the presence of mainstream enterprise storage companies validates this technology trend.

The disk prices are reducing as the capacity of the drives grow higher. The technology change on the acceptance of SSD’s, SAS , NL-SAS as the disk combination is keeping the storage prices in the similar bracket as earlier. But, the tiering and use of combination of cache with different disk types is driving the performance of the storage sub system. The customers are looking at a comparison towards $/IOPS and $/GBPS as opposed to $/TB for their enterprise and database workloads.

Reliance BIG Entertainment, Jaypee Group and Apollo are some of its customers.

Apollo Group

Apollo Group, an education provider, is leveraging Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance to streamline the ERP system technology that supports student services teams at its higher education subsidiaries.

Using the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance with Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture best practices for Oracle Exadata backup and recovery, Apollo Group shrunk its backup window from more than 24 hours to less than 40 minutes for a full backup of a 4 TB database. The result: a more reliable online service for students who rely upon the integrated hardware and software solutions as part of their coursework and progress toward graduation. The Sun ZFS Storage Appliance also enabled Apollo Group to reduce its disaster recovery time and helped reduce cloning time by one-third for its development and test environment.

Michael Sajor, CIO of Apollo Group, said: “Streamlining our E-Business Suite infrastructure on Oracle engineered systems enables our student-facing teams to reduce time spent on tedious—but mission-critical – tasks, so they can focus on strategic issues that promote our goal of a better educated and prepared workforce. Apollo Group is focused on functionality, simplicity of use, speed to market and flexibility—and Oracle’s systems are helping us deliver on how we interact and serve potential and existing students.”

Reliance BIG Entertainment

Reliance BIG Entertainment demanded a reliable, robust, and scalable server infrastructure to support its ERP application and growing media-related businesses.  By implementing Oracle’s SPARC T4 Series servers running Oracle Solaris, and Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600 storage system, the organization has cut data backup times by up to 70%, significantly reduced IT administration and data center costs, and can process transactions, such as financial and procurement report generation, up to 80% faster.

“The financial services market in India is extremely competitive and customers have many options when it comes to finding an appropriate loan to meet their requirements. The Oracle infrastructure ensures we can provide our customers with access to loans as quickly and efficiently as possible,” said Shashi Kumar Ravulapaty, senior vice president and CTO, Reliance Commercial Finance.

Jaypee Group

Jaypee Group uses Pillar Axiom 600 to run their enterprise applications. As a growing company with operations in diversified business, Jaiprakash’s storage requirements are continually changing and expanding. The company needed a cost-effective and scalable storage solution to meet the demands of its growing data and support future business expansion.

“We chose Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600 over competing vendors, including IBM, as its modular design and near-linear scaling of storage capacity and performance has enabled us to confidently grow our business at the lowest cost,” said Manoj Kumar, head of IT, Jaiprakash Associates.

Jaiprakash Associates reduced its total cost of ownership as Pillar Axiom 600 is one of the best storage solutions in the industry that can support our continued growth. It has also significantly increased our system performance and accelerated decision-making across all divisions without any system downtime.

CIO tips

Data storage requirements are exploding across the board for all businesses – for databases, virtualization, unstructured content, and data protection. Over the years, the dramatic growth in data generation has put increased stress on organization’s existing infrastructure and has impacted all strategic decisions made by CEOs and CIOs.

Some things to be kept in mind while looking for storage solutions are:

Performance- One of the top requirements of today’s storage applications is that they must provide both high performance, as well as the ability to preserve and manage large volumes of file-based and often block-based data.

Reliability – Storage solutions need to be extremely reliable as an enterprise’s most valued information gets stored in those.

Capacity- IT managers are being asked to continuously meet these growing storage capacity needs on flat or declining IT budgets—all the while being expected to support high service levels for more and more users. Therefore it is extremely crucial to keep in mind this aspect while selecting storage solutions.

Back up ability- Today’s vast repositories of data represent valuable intellectual property that must be protected to ensure the livelihood of the enterprise. While backup and archival capabilities are designed to guard against data loss, they do not necessarily protect against silent data corruption. The best scenario, of course, is to prevent data loss in the primary disk storage system.

Alignment- Today’s IT environments require storage solutions that can be engineered with hardware and software together to offer greater efficiency in order to manage ongoing operating costs.

Latest challenges

The challenges in this space revolve around the changing needs from enterprises who themselves are continuously challenged to optimize performance of their storage infrastructure. Information technology leaders contend with inadequate performance and scale, storage inefficiencies, high deployment and operating costs and complex management. IT companies of all sizes are face challenges of storage consolidation, lack of skilled storage professionals, designing, deploying, managing storage and managing storage growth.

“The opportunity that we see for ourselves is exhibiting Oracle’s business-ready storage systems that are created keeping in mind the requirements of IT companies. Our storage systems integrate innovative hardware architectures, automated storage tiering and simplified storage management software into an intelligent infrastructure,” said Amit Malhotra of Oracle.

Rajani Baburajan
[email protected]