Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Dell EMC PowerFlex – Exploiting Snapshots for Oracle Database Backup and Recovery > PowerFlex architecture
The PowerFlex appliance is a fully integrated, preconfigured, and validated hyperconverged infrastructure that integrates PowerFlex storage virtualization software with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. Customers can choose from a predefined set of appliances populated with Intel CPUs, memory, and storage capacity.
The PowerFlex appliance is deployed either in a typical hyperconverged architecture or as independent storage and compute nodes, across heterogeneous virtualized or bare-metal environments. Most of the use cases are for high-performance databases or analytics.
The PowerFlex appliance provides a scale-out architecture that allows you to start small and grow in increments. The flexible architecture enables you to mix and match configuration types in the same cluster. It also allows you to grow and manage your compute and storage resources together or independently, depending on your needs. For licensing Oracle workloads, the asymmetrical scaling is of particular interest to customers.