EMC and Oracle want database administrators to spend less time in the back office and more time in the front office, with the business guys. That’s the word from Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of product operations, solutions and marketing at storage giant EMC, which was a keynote presenter this week at Oracle OpenWorld.

Database administrators tend to dedicate a lot of hours to diagnosing performance issues, monitoring availability, and managing backup and replication, Burton said, but they don’t need to do that anymore. EMC has created a plugin for Oracle Enterprise Manager that offers logical to physical mapping and provides a large amount of performance information about the storage array so DBAs can manage thresholds based on exceptions that trigger alarms. That means DBAs are alerted when needed, and no longer have to stand watch.

The new solution also can deliver pre-canned business intelligence reports, including a hosted-based VMAX performance report, throughput performance report, and space usage report so administrators can easily see the exact amount of space left on a storage resource.


Image via Shutterstock

This plugin is now available for free. To get it, go to Oracle Manager Extensibility website, which will take you to the EMC support page where you can download it and have it up and running within minutes, he said.

Burton went on to discuss backup and recovery, explaining that EMC protects Oracle databases, but it doesn’t treat an Oracle database as just another file. Instead, it now operates at the block level instead of the app level.

“Backup is one of the most intensive applications, bar none,” he said.

So EMC deduplicates the data on the Oracle server itself, minimizing the amount of data that needs to be passed across the network.

He also talked about the importance of database availability, which he said can degrade if data centers are too far apart. But now, using the VPLEX rack, active data centers can go to 100km, and workloads can be distributed between two data centers, or can be moved from one to the other, he said.

Moving on to the subject of virtualization, which Burton said is changing everything because it is based on pools of resources, he noted EMC delivers a solution called Vblock in concert with its Virtual Computing Environment Coalition partners Cisco and VMware.

And if companies need new storage quickly, EMC offers ViPR software-defined storage with a controller that does provisioning in an automated way. EMC also will be releasing software-based versions of file and block storage, he added.